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.
Old Life 
The world can do without both the song and your post about it.
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Pa, but wouldn’t that be an other world? You live in this one.
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Is is just me or do you picture Pa sitting on a porch swing with banjo in hand, somwhere near the Cahulawassee river?
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I heard the song and thought, “So what?” Have a little historical sympathy! I mean, honestly, “they theology is real good!”
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Ryan, Let’s not get carried away.
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Nice post. I just taught on Whitfield yesterday and read a quote of his on slavery in Georgia:
“As for the lawfulness of keeping slaves, I have no doubt, since I hear of some that were bought with Abraham’s money, and some that were born in his house.—And I cannot help thinking, that some of those servants mentioned by the Apostles in their epistles, were or had been slaves. It is plain, that the Gibeonites were doomed to perpetual slavery, and though liberty is a sweet thing to such as are born free, yet to those who never knew the sweets of it, slavery perhaps may not be so irksome. However this be, it is plain to a demonstration, that hot countries cannot be cultivated without negroes. What a flourishing country might Georgia have been, had the use of them been permitted years ago? How many white people have been destroyed for want of them, and how many thousands of pounds spent to no purpose at all? Had Mr Henry been in America, I believe he would have seen the lawfulness and necessity of having negroes there. And though it is true, that they are brought in a wrong way from their own country, and it is a trade not to be approved of, yet as it will be carried on whether we will or not; I should think myself highly favoured if I could purchase a good number of them, in order to make their lives comfortable, and lay a foundation for breeding up their posterity in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. You know, dear Sir, that I had no hand in bringing them into Georgia; though my judgement was for it, and so much money was yearly spent to no purpose, and I was strongly importuned thereto, yet I would not have a negro upon my plantation, till the use of them was publicly allowed in the colony. Now this is done, dear Sir, let us reason no more about it, but diligently improve the present opportunity for their instruction. The trustees favour it, and we may never have a like prospect. It rejoiced my soul, to hear that one of my poor negroes in Carolina was made a brother in Christ. How know we but we may have many such instances in Georgia ere it be long?”
We are indeed all creatures of the time and place in which we find ourselves. Certainly our society tolerates (even celebrates) things that people from the past would rightly find repugnant.
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It’s hard to toughen up, when every thought much less action is either surrendered to King Jesus or given over to the king of darkness. It’s not about being tough, but being faithful. Toughening up means primarily that you reconcile that not all things in life are clear and life can be complex, and most answers unsatisfactory in an ‘ultimate’ sense. That’s tough to do when your religious project now involves evaluating the ‘godly’ nature of a movie, or sifting through the ‘what’ of Mitt’s mormonism that’s in harmony with biblical principles and trying to conclude that Mitt’s ‘what’ is more biblical than Obama’s ‘what’. Man if I could push pass my convictions and put the flag and Jesus Christ on what I do………
The most important men in town would come to fawn on me!
They would ask me to advise them,
Like a Solomon the Wise.
“If you please, Reb Tevye…”
“Pardon me, Reb Tevye…”
Posing problems that would cross a rabbi’s eyes!
And it won’t make one bit of difference if i answer right or wrong.
When you’re rich, they think you really know!
This is the song I hear everytime I pass Hagee’s church.
The only thing that’s remotely as profitable is scantily clad women.
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Darryl, Thanks for this post, and some good perspective here. As you know, what is also often lost in this is the distinction between racism and slavery. In general, as Mark Noll points out, even those who condemned slavery endorsed racist social and scientific theories in one way or another, and it was possible for someone who was pro-slavery to be much less racist (and unjust in practice) than someone who was anti-slavery.
Some people seem to worry that if we criticize our forbears for something significant no one will take them seriously anymore. But if we expect to see sin and failure in ourselves as well as in our past heroes, I don’t see why this should be the case. Indeed, I would argue that it is only if we take our heroes seriously enough to disagree with them from time to time (rather than excusing them as simply being “products of their time”) are we actually showing them the respect the tradition deserves. If we say Calvin was wrong to argue that the government should enforce the true religion simply because he was a product of his time, we will always be left with the question of whether or not we are simply products of our time, and Calvin was right after all. If, on the other hand, we take him seriously enough to engage his arguments for his position, and demonstrate why they were wrong, we can actually understand the theological foundation for our own position.
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there’s something happening here, and you don’t know what it is, do you?
Oh, you get it but you don’t get it.
Oh, that we can go back to an America that once were, founded on
Christian values.
They don’t build preachers like they used to. Oh, the richness of
their revelations.
It must be nice to not have to consider race.
————–
Soon After Midnight
I’m searching for phrases,
To sing your praises,
I need to tell someone,
It’s soon after midnight,
And my day has just begun
A gal named Holly,
Took my money,
She was passing by,
It’s soon after midnight,
And the moon is in my eye
My heart is cheerful,
It’s never fearful,
I’ve been down on the killing floors,
I’m in no great hurry,
I’m not afraid of your fury,
I’ve faced stronger wars than yours
It’s now or never,
More than ever,
When I meet ya I did’nt think you’d do,
It’s soon after midnight,
And I don’t want nobody but you
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Fair enough! Propaganda has made a good case for a revisionist approach to using qoutations in writing or preaching. Instead of “Puritan pastor, …, once said, we should use “According to one seventeenth century person, …”. Or, instead of “William Perkins, the famous Puritan,” we should say, “One popular person in history with a penchant for the Bible has put it thus:”.
There are some finer points about which I’d cavil, but on the whole I think he’s on to something.
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Part of the problem with the nuance that’s being asked for is that it runs counter the entire way slavery has been isolated from the culture that created, fed it, enhanced it, institutionalized it and fought for it. I find it remarkable how much slavery is discussed in our schools, with almost no discussion of what American slavery was, why it existed, how it worked, what contemporary people believed about it…..
Kentucky was likely the state with the most horrific form of slavery to moderns (buy up huge quantities of male slaves work them hard clearing land until mosquito born plague got to them, on average about 4 years, and replace). Disciples of Christ was the most active denominations and yet they were mixed on slavery. More or less all of southern Protestantism embraced slavery. I’m not sure how that critique doesn’t more or less apply to all of conservative Protestantism. The Puritans don’t seem much worse than other Protestants on the issue in the time periods he is talking about.
If we want to look at race… Catholics while first mixed on the issue by the late 17th century were firmly anti-slavery. They deserve the kudos. Jews were mostly indifferent but those who were interested were almost all on the abolitionist side. Liberal Christianity emerged partially out of the abolitionist movement so they have a solid 19th century record.
I don’t know how to make hay on this issue and believe what Propaganda does theologically.
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Thank you Dr. Hart for such an insightful post. This particular post is extremely helpful. I do not know what it says about things when a historian finally has to put on the theological hat regarding this issue. Anyhow, I am glad for the clarity. I hope the irony of this article is not missed, that 2K is obviously extremely beneficial for race relations, discussing slavery etc.
Bobby
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Just to do a little moral chest pounding myself….
It seems that Christians today take issue with Christians in the past who have oppressed various people groups. Whether it was Columbus and Native Americans or Puritans and Africans, we seem to have little trouble traversing time to hand out our moral judgement. But for some reason that 20/20 moral vision of the past becomes much more cloudy when judging modern day Christians support for government policies regarding people groups Christians find less than exemplary (i.e. Muslims).
We’ve had two Christian presidents who have been supported by the majority of conservative Christians regarding two wars in Muslim countries and drone strikes in other sovereign Muslim nations, both of which have resulted in significant civilian casualties. Not to mention a government policy of torture and a very long history of interfering in Muslim countries’ affairs (see Shah, Iran, CIA). I have not heard any Christian rap songs, nor read any blogging biblical ethicists, nor seen any posts by JT over at TGC that seem to want to deal with these issues.
Why is it so easy to judge Columbus and Native Americans or Puritans and Africans, yet we find it so difficult to judge Americans and Muslims? Could it be that detecting societal oppression and injustice in the present is much more difficult than seeing it in the past? I wonder how we will be judged by Christians 100 years from now? If the present is indicative of the future, I am not very hopeful. Me thinks we will be subjected to the moral chest pounding of a future generation.
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Matt, the problem with the clay that attends all historical actors — John Winthrop and slavery or John Calvin and Servetus — is that in our time racism and slavery are unforgivable sins. Whether that should be the case is of course the question. But if you do question it, you generally get charged with defending slavery and with being a racist. Just think of how much H. L. Mencken has suffered thanks to his remarks about Jews — even though he also said a lot of other things about Jews. No one seems to worry about Mencken’s anti-Christian comments (I don’t). But we do have select prejudices that can’t be challenged. It doesn’t seem healthy at all for Christians to borrow from the Egyptians on this one.
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You better watch out or next thing you’ll be saying Christians may vote for pro-choice presidential candidates…
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CD, not so fast on the Roman Catholics. Jason Wallace’s book, Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism, 1835–1860, suggests RC’s in the South were not anti-slavery.
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Lewis, ding, ding, ding.
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Rube, some do and they still partake of the elements.
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Lewis,
Are you suggesting that our imperial machinations are misguided? Don’t you realize that the Islamic world hates us for our freedom?
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With Calvin & Servetus, the Genevans just had the misfortune of getting him first. If he had fell into Catholic hands his fate would have been the same. It was a different time and place. Also, people forget that Calvin was not the civil magistrate.
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Jed, Lewis, et. al. –
Not to mention the cost of these adventures. Not a dime for the poor, but unlimted funds for wars! That’s conservatism?
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But Lewis, I’ve been told to be a single issue voter! http://issuu.com/sbts/docs/towers_2012_october
If I have a moral responsibility to vote, I need it to be as uncomplicated as possible and I can’t be expected to think about things other than the over-turning of Roe v. Wade.
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Erik,
Military and Corporate welfare? No problem (regardless of the echoes of facism). When you start talking welfare for the poor is when you start sounding like an un-American commie.
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Hi DG —
At least looking at the summary it appears the book is arguing how Norther Catholics and Southerns worked together to counter the Northern Protestant political / theological view that American values were New England Protestant values. I agree with that thesis. But that is wholly different than Catholics failing to oppose much less supporting slavery.
Certainly many slave owners sent their kids to Catholic schools. The Pope did recognize the CSA. Bishop Augustin Verot went pretty far in supporting slavery but even he spoke out against the slave trade. I’m not seeing it.
I think the Catholics get the feather, that when it counted they stood against the slavery.
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Erik —
Servetus is not an isolated example. Calvin was a proponent in many cases of the use of state terror as a means of achieving religious advancement. He used foreign loyalists and spies against the domestic population.
Further, Calvin argued for church discipline rights over all inhabitants going well beyond even the inquisitions claims over all Catholics. In terms of heresy there were also:
Jacques Gruet (beheaded)
Sebastian Castellio (attempted but failed)
There were 28 executions (at least some put the number at 57) for witchcraft involving Calvin which is borderline as far as heresy.
He didn’t rack up a huge body count but he only ruled a city, had constant opposition and didn’t rule it for that long.
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This was illustrated beautifully to me this weekend as my wife told me of couple whose parent took out a loan in her son’s name (father and son have same name), made no effort to pay it back, and subsequently destroyed the son’s credit and left him with thousands in debt to his name. She let me know that they were struggling with how to handle the situation, and I, in my self-righteous zeal said, “That’s easy, you call the creditors and tell them your mom took out a loan in your name, forged a signature, and the loan is bunk. The debt should be either handed to her since she signed or you cancel the loan if the document contains her signature. What’s so hard about that?”
My wife, in all her wisdom, said, “Yes, but Nate, how have you dealt with the difficult things with your parents?” My chest pounding (thanks Lewis) was ceased at once.
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This just came across my e-mail:
Should we celebrate Columbus Day?
An organized movement is seeking to rename Columbus Day. Columbus Day became a federal holiday in 1937, but one group of people has created a website encouraging people to petition Congress to rename it Exploration Day. Organizers said the new name would celebrate all exploration and address the concerns of people who oppose celebrating Christopher Columbus. For more information, visit the group’s website.
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The next thing is for “Exploration Day” to be changed to an occasion for us all to “explore the whole range of human sexuality” or some such nonsense…
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CD – Make your case for how Calvin “ruled a city”. When was he the Magistrate as well as the religious leader?
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This is the aspect I seem only able to get from Old Life: the 500 lb. gorilla in the living room called historical self-righteousness.
Lewis, and ding. But I think there is good reason the pro-lifers employ the slavery issue to make their own point—because in 100 years they want the moral majority that abolitionists have now.
Erik, no that’s neo-conservatism (or just conservativism).
Sean, Pulpit Freedom Sunday finally got through to you yesterday. It only took five years, but PTL.
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Nate – You hit on the tension between justice & mercy. We tend to want to give justice to others and receive mercy from others (and not vice-versa). The civil magistrate, however, needs to pursue justice in order for us to have a civilization. Perhaps the solution to the situation you cite is some mix of justice and mercy. Exactly what that mix is, I can’t say.
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– Make your case for how Calvin “ruled a city”. When was he the Magistrate as well as the religious leader?
That’s more or less the same claim Colonel Gaddafi made to Andrea Mitchell before the intervention, that he hadn’t ruled Libya since 1977. Or that Putin wasn’t ruling Russia for the last 4 years since Dmitry Medvedev was in power. Or to pick an American example, if unofficial power doesn’t exist why was Fiorello La Guardia, Robert Moses and Franklin Roosevelt assuming control from Tammany Hall seen as such a watershed? It isn’t uncommon for effective heads of government to not official power and to have functionaries in their place.
Geneva was a theocracy. The state freely passed religious ordinances and religious rulings were upheld by the state. With the exception of the Perrinists most of the powerful in Geneva were loyal to Calvin. He had tremendous official power and loyalists throughout the government. In what sense, that wouldn’t exclude most whom we call dictators wasn’t he head of the government?
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Was it the Roman government or the Jewish religious leaders who put Jesus to death? Did Calvin control a police force or an army? If Calvin was in control in Geneva why was his wish to have Servetus put to death with the sword instead of burned at the stake not granted? I don’t deny Calvin had a tremendous amount of influence but I don’t think it is accurate to say he “ruled a city”. You are also displaying the very approach that D.G.’s post is all about. Let’s turn the discussion to the great deeds done (or rather not done) by secularists throughout history, shall we?
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Matthew Tuininga: “If we say Calvin was wrong to argue that the government should enforce the true religion simply because he was a product of his time, we will always be left with the question of whether or not we are simply products of our time. On the other hand, we take him seriously enough to engage his arguments for his position, and demonstrate why they were wrong, we can actually understand the theological foundation for our own position.”
mark: Hear, hear! There is more than one kind of “historical self-righteousness”. Those who excuse their heroes as being creatures of their times tend not to notice the diversity of that time. For example, those who explain to us that Calvin wasn’t dealing with the question of “limited atonement”, need to become more aware of the debates during Calvin’s time between anabaptists (universal ineffective atonement) and Reformed folks like Martin Bucer (definite atonement). See Jonathan H. Rainbow’s excellent The Will of God and The Cross.
Even if it be proven that those who are tolerant (or better, who insist on civil liberty) for the unorthodox are themselves less than orthodox (Castellio), this is not a good defense of a Magisterial Reformation. For every John Winthrop, you can find a puritan credobaptist like Roger Williams who kept peace with the Native Americans and thus did much good, not only for the the original occupants but also for the imperialistic kind of puritans (the ones who lead and never follow). Not all puritans are the same.
William James: “Take for instance all the Chinamen. Which of you here, my friends, sees any fitness in their eternal perpetuation unreduced in numbers? Surely not one of you.”
The great benefit of the gospel is remission of sins for sinners. The sins of those who have been justified are not imputed to them but have been legally counted to Christ. If that grace sounds like something which cuts the activist nerve which rises up against slavery, then perhaps we are people who think we somehow are no longer sinners.
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The modern mind recoils at Calvin’s Geneva, without questioning the life we live in a country full of murderers, rapists, child molesters, pornographers, abortionists, drug dealers, drug addicts, drunk drivers, thieves, welfare cheats, and on and on. I might trade a society where all someone asked me to do is to go to church and act like a Christian for that.
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Mark – I think Williams got worse theologically as he got older.
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This is all a good reminder why we focus on ideas and not men. There was only one good man and we all know what happened to him.
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Another point about Calvin’s Geneva is that people came from all over Europe to get in. Whenever secularists set up a paradise like Cuba, North Korea, or Post-WWII East Germany they have to build walls to keep people there.
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CD-H, I’m not denying that religion was established in Geneva and as such pastors had civil status and quasi-legal power. But since Calvin didn’t become even a citizen of Geneva until the mid-1550s, and since he was banned from the city in the 1530s, it sure looks to me like the civil authorities wielded civil power.
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Erick – I think Williams got worse theologically as he got older.
mark: Well, then you need to read some more, and not simply slander a man who did a great deal of good for Mr Winthrop and the others who exiled him from the puritan colony. If you read Williams, you would find him to believe (and talk about) God’s sovereign and predestinating grace as much as anybody on this list. As you may know, Williams was invited to be the pastor of some of the largest separatist churches in New England.
If you read my posts, you will know that I never defend the gospel or the theology of the anabaptists murdered by the Magisteral Reformers in Europe. But in the case of Roger Williams, there is no reason to call into question his gospel. Especially if we are not going to call into question the gospel of the neo-nomians (assurance by works) who owned slaves and burned witches.
Read, study some more, Erick. Unless you want to say, well he doesn’t agree with me about the politics, so that must mean that he doesn’t agree with me on the gospel. Williams was always an extreme separatist. Now you are perfectly free to say that separatism is a bad theology, but even those who put him out were separatists.
But then, Erick, I remember that you assume that all credobaptists are Arminians until and unless they begin baptizing babies. On this, you first.
Affirm for us that you deny that Christ died for any of the non-elect. Affirm for us a distinction between “the covenant” being also for the non-elect and Christ’s death being for the non-elect. Go ahead. It won’t hurt.
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Mark – I need to look at my notes & I’ll tell you where I got that notion on Williams. I think he was right about a lot of things. He was ahead of his time. He didn’t get along with the Quakers, which is to his credit (although the Quakers made the first Presbytery in the U.S. possible in Philadelphia in 1706). I have mixed feelings about the New England Puritans myself, so I agree with him on that. I actually read a good article on him in “The Nation” of all places a few months ago. I’ll get back to you later.
You need to check your glasses when you spell my name. Get the angle right on the bifocals.
You are also sounding a bit more excitable than Richard Smith. You might need some metamucil or something.
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“Affirm for us that you deny that Christ died for any of the non-elect. Affirm for us a distinction between “the covenant” being also for the non-elect and Christ’s death being for the non-elect. Go ahead. It won’t hurt.”
You switch from the positive to the negative so many times in that question that I have trouble even figuring out what you are asking (or what it has to do with Williams).
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Erik C: I have mixed feelings about the New England Puritans myself, so I agree with him on that.
RS: You sound like a Charismatic when you talk about your feelings and mixed feelings. So you just examine your feelings to tell you what to think about the New England Puritans? Beware, Dr. Hart will come down on you for that.
Erik C: You need to check your glasses when you spell my name. Get the angle right on the bifocals. You are also sounding a bit more excitable than Richard Smith. You might need some metamucil or something.
RS: I am not the one checking my feelings in order to tell me what to think about the New England Puritans.
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Erik Charter, quoting Mark: “Affirm for us that you deny that Christ died for any of the non-elect. Affirm for us a distinction between “the covenant” being also for the non-elect and Christ’s death being for the non-elect. Go ahead. It won’t hurt.”
Erik Charter: You switch from the positive to the negative so many times in that question that I have trouble even figuring out what you are asking (or what it has to do with Williams).
RS: As Mark would remind you, I don’t speak for him. However, he takes long breaks (as do I) from making re-marks and comments, so I thought I would try to get at the heart of his questions. If am way off base, I am sure he will correct me.
Erik, after checking to see how your mixed feelings led, you have affirmed your belief in the practice of paedobaptism and have affirmed (I think) that infants now are in the Abrahamic covenant as an expression of the covenant of grace. Therefore,
Q. 1: Did Christ die for anyone that is not elect?
Q. 2: Can you make a distinction between 1) the covenant being for those who are not elect and 2) Christ’s death being for those who are not elect?
In terms of Roger Williams, you made the comment that RW’s theology got worse as he got older. But Williams always affirmed the Gospel of grace alone and grace is always a sovereign grace to be grace at all. I am eager to read your replies.
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Richard. Normally I would say touche, but in your case it’s douche.
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J-Zilla: Richard. Normally I would say touche, but in your case it’s douche.
RS:
Matthew 5:22 “But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be guilty before the court; and whoever says to his brother, ‘You good-for-nothing,’ shall be guilty before the supreme court; and whoever says, ‘You fool,’ shall be guilty enough to go into the fiery hell
Mat 12:34 “You brood of vipers, how can you, being evil, speak what is good? For the mouth speaks out of that which fills the heart. 35 “The good man brings out of his good treasure what is good; and the evil man brings out of his evil treasure what is evil. 36 “But I tell you that every careless word that people speak, they shall give an accounting for it in the day of judgment.
37 “For by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.”
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ugh ya got me…… with a proof text
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mark: Affirm for us that you deny that Christ died for any of the non-elect. Affirm for us a distinction between “the covenant” being also for the non-elect and Christ’s death being for the non-elect. Go ahead. It won’t hurt.”
erik: You switch from the positive to the negative so many times in that question that I have trouble even figuring out what you are asking (or what it has to do with Williams).
mark: This was a response to your idea that the way for Credobaptists to show that they are not Arminians is to baptize babies.
Before we credobaptists attempt to satisfy your standards for not being Arminian, I thought it would be good for you to prove to us that you yourself are not an Arminian. So you need to affirm for us that Christ died only for the elect and not for the non-elect.
There is so much dialectic and double-talk happening that I think we need the antithesis, and not the “in some sense yes and in another sense no” and “everything is gray, since Christ has not yet returned” evasions.
How does my request relate? If you correlate credobaptism (not the kind that paedobaptists do of course) with Arminianism, then perhaps I should raise some similar questions about those who say that some of the non-elect are included in the new covenant. Did Christ died for all those in the new covenant?
What does this have to do with Roger Williams? My first post said that we can’t be self-righteous about some of our heroes because they were “people of their time”, because there were different views at the time. Now, erik, you could have simply let that go, thinking to yourself–how does it relate. But instead, you got excited and said, let’s talk about ideas and not about people, and oh by the way that person Williams, not so good on gospel ideas.
You were throwing stuff against the wall against one person to protect other persons. Clean it up and calm yourself.
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Erik said: “Mark – I think Williams got worse theologically as he got older.”
Mark heard this as: “you got excited and said, let’s talk about ideas and not about people, and oh by the way that person Williams, not so good on gospel ideas.”
Erik: O.K. – Where did I even use the word gospel?
Here is what I find on Williams according to Ahlstrom’s “Religious History of the American People” (pp. 170-171):
(And keep in mind neither he or I is saying everything about Williams was bad)
(1) After founding what is generally considered to be the first Baptist Church in North America in 1639 and being baptized by immersion he decided a short time later “that their baptism could not be right because it was not administered by an apostle”
(2) “Going even further, Williams left the ministry and denied the legitimacy of instituted churches altogether.”
He still remained orthodox in many ways, but as a Reformed guy I would call getting all Harold Camping-esque on us as “getting worse theologically”.
Ahlstrom does report that at age 70 he rowed 30 miles by himself to argue with (Quaker leader) George Fox so I commend him for that.
As for the other points you are making, I need you to give me some quotes for things I have said to know what you are talking about. I admit I often have trouble following your train of thought because you write so much in a post.
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I don’t think I would say that all Credobaptists are Arminians, but if you want to read an interesting post (in my opinion, anyway), go to my blog by clicking on my name and search for “Mr. Miyagi on Cornerstone Church of Ames, Iowa’s Statement on the Doctrine of Election (And a Reformed Response)”.
I do confess the five points so I have no trouble confessing the “L”.
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My covenant view is pretty simple (although this may be a discussion for the 1000 post string going on on the other channel).
Covenant people = visible church (Old Testament = Jews & those connected to them, New Testament = Christian church members and their children).
Covenant sign = circumcision in the Old testament, baptism in the new testament
Within the covenant people we find those who are elect/saved and unelect/not saved. The elect/saved make up the invisible church.
This is why I bow out of these discussions after we get to post 500 or so. I don’t have much to add to the discussion.
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Mark, I’m not sure who you have in mind when you speak of “excusing heroes as being creatures of their times.” But when it comes to theocracy, the 2k in these parts tries to be careful on the one hand to unequivocally stand with Kuyper who said unconditionally that he did not at all hide the fact that he disagreed with Calvin (and our confessions and our Reformed theologians), and on the other explain more than justify why it might be that there was something to disagree with in Calvin.
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I mostly had Erik in mind, but I hear it a lot from Banner of Truth folks. I agree with you, Zirm, about Kuyper calling Calvin out on this. I am not sure I understand your ‘two hands”, because they sound as if they are saying the same thing. Explain but not justify. Yes, Or as I sometimes say–explain not to be self-righteous, but to repudiate and not do it again.
Maybe you just like the number two. Two kingdoms. Two swords.
Kuyper “We oppose (Belgic 36) out of complete conviction, prepared to bear the consequences of our convictions, even when we will be denounced and mocked on that account as unReformed. We would rather be considered not Reformed and insist that men ought not to kill heretics, than that we are left with the Reformed name as the prize for assisting in the shedding of the blood of heretics…We do not at all hide the fact that we disagree with Calvin, our Confessions, and our Reformed theologians.”
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erik: i don’t think I would say that all Credobaptists are Arminians,
mark: you did tell us though that the way to prove that we weren’t Arminians was to baptize infants. You are welcome to take that back
erik: but if you want to read an interesting post (in my opinion, anyway), go to my blog by clicking on my name and search for “Mr. Miyagi on Cornerstone Church of Ames, Iowa’s Statement on the Doctrine of Election (And a Reformed Response)”.
mark: you wouldn’t say we are Arminians, but you won’t hesitate to associate us with a credobaptist who is. Shall I quote for you the unlimited atonement teaching of one of my local pca pastors and then associate you with that Reformed teaching?
jeff: I do confess the five points so I have no trouble confessing the “L”.
mark: Does this mean that you don’t deny it? Or does it mean that you are going to start affirming the gospel doctrine of the atonement here and now?
Would it be better to hear about Christ’s death for the elect from a female than to hear about Christ’s death for all sinners from a male? I know what Southern Baptists say about which is the “bad theology”.
I will not eat green eggs and ham, not even in a credobaptist church. TWO wrongs don’t make a right, and sometimes both things are wrong.
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Mark – Are you a member of a church and, if so, direct me to their website so I can see what they believe. If you say you are not an Arminian, I believe you.
In my mind, having spent many years in Baptist churches, I lump the hymn “I Have Decided to Follow Jesus”, the altar call, and credobaptism together. I have admittedly never spent time in a Reformed Baptist Church, so I admit I should probably not lump them in with the Baptists I have known. It’s just hard for me not to tie the notion of people “choosing” and Arminianism together.
From your experience how do a Reformed Baptist church and an Arminian/Ambiguous Baptist church “look” different? The church I wrote the post on affirms election, but at the same time affirms that people need to “choose”. They declare this paradox a “mystery” and say that any further attempts to probe the mystery “must be rejected”. It’s goofy. I’ve known many of these folks since I was in high school. Their response to my “probing the mystery” is silence.
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My solution to their mystery is to declare that it is not a mystery at all. Those God elects he also gives the ability to make the right choice (i.e. He gives them saving faith). Those God does not elect he does not give the ability to make the right choice (i.e. He leaves them in their sin). Interestingly, this Baptist church says nothing that I could find about the original sin of Adam, which is critical if one is to understand total depravity. Heidelberg 6-11 explain original sin right off the bat.
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I do have a better appreciation for Reformed Baptists after dealing with you, Richard, & C.G. (The Irish guy). Prior to you three the only Reformed Baptist guy I was very excited about was Ken Jones (and maybe John Piper). I just don’t know too many others. If a Reformed Baptist is truly Reformed we have way more in common than not. The biggest question mark I still have is how you regard your unbaptized children. It just seems like a missing piece to me of a fully Reformed theology. But I don’t really want to debate it for a week. I’ll just affirm it as a mystery…
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Baptism & Covenant Theology are kind of like the athlete’s foot of the Old Life locker room. They have a way of infecting every post.
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McMark,
Why am I unable to track all the way through with your cov theology arguments? Eveytime I want to explain your tensions in my mind I anticipate visible/invisible distinctions but I don’t see you offer that as resolution. Do you deny the visible/invisible distinction?
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Erik Charter: Baptism & Covenant Theology are kind of like the athlete’s foot of the Old Life locker room. They have a way of infecting every post.
RS: No, covenant theology has a way of infecting evey post. Baptism is like the spray what washes all the infection away.
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Richard – At least you come around to agreeing with us on the mode. Spraying is a lot closer to sprinkling than immersion is…
I can just envision you with your squirt bottle.
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@DGH (and Erik)
CD-H, I’m not denying that religion was established in Geneva and as such pastors had civil status and quasi-legal power. But since Calvin didn’t become even a citizen of Geneva until the mid-1550s, and since he was banned from the city in the 1530s, it sure looks to me like the civil authorities wielded civil power.
I wouldn’t count the 1530s. I think Calvin was an influential figure on the church then, but not something I could call a dictator. The Consistory isn’t established until 1541 and it is based on the German system after his exile.
In 1542 Calvin begins a massive inquest where he ends up pulling 5% of the Genevan population before the Consistory many of them on charges about not being zealous for the Reformation (i.e. thought crime). Drunkenness, blaspheme, usury, wastrels (is wastrely a word?), gambling, lying… take on a religious dimension with criminal penalties. 1541/1542 is when he establishes a system that is broad enough to get anyone via, an attack on common place deviances and has force of law behind it. Calvin’s aim seems to be to control of all human behavior.
I have a copy of Kingdon’s book which covers ’42-44. You see a long list of cases:
a) The state is absolute there is no area where it doesn’t feel free to explore
b) Thought crime when suspected is rooted out and punished
The Consistory passes people over the council who don’t agree to “voluntarily cooperate” and there involuntary civil penalties are involved. And these escalate overtime towards mostly a death penalty with some exile.
The qualification for a dictator generally is the ability to unilaterally make law without effective restraint by a legislative assembly. Note that doesn’t say formal restraint. If you will grant that definition, I’m hard pressed to see how Calvin wasn’t a dictator. Lets take the most extreme example. How are Calvin’s attacks on people for still retaining some vestal Catholicism different in kind than Stalin’s attacks on retaining some vestal support for the old regime?
One can certainly define a dictator more narrowly as someone who has absolute formal power, but you would exclude virtually everyone we call a dictator Saddam Hussein would qualify but Colonel Gaddafi wouldn’t be close to qualifying.
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D.G. Hart: 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.
RS: This is a very important point. There are many points about this rap “song” and those who seem to defend it that need to be considered. Racism and slavery are not unforgivable sins, and this is not to mention that not all that is called racism or slavery are necessarily sins at all. What is the author of that “song” guilty of when he lumps all that can be called Puritans together and thinks of them as slave-holders? Could that statement be guilty of racism as well? The “holier-than-thou anti-slavery” concept is virtually on line with the Greatest Commandment in parts of America. Sorry, but I still think that the commands of Jesus to love our enemies and the teachings of Jesus through Paul regarding slavery are still true.
D.G. Hart: Of course, slavery is unjust and of course, racism is despicable.
RS: But, of course, we must be careful since slavery in the OT (admittedly a different kind than some of what went on in the US) does not seem to be condemned. Racism is sinful, but not all that is called racism is indeed racism. Some would think of me as racist for simply saying that the “song” is ludicrous. But, of course, racism within Christianity is far worse than when it is out of the Church. Christ died for His children and all who are in Him are one with Him and all who are in Him. There is neither slave nor free nor any other more important distinctions other than being in Christ. When people make race out to be more important than being one in Christ, those people are worse than racist.
D.G. Hart: 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.
RS: In the words of Dr. Hart in other places, ding, ding, ding. Evidently the Puritans (in the “song”) were all racist since some (how many?) owned slaves and so we should not quote the Puritans. Richard Baxter, who wrote against owning slaves, was a Puritan. Should we not quote him? Thabiti Anyabwile, who is far, far from the theological and experimental (sorry, Dr. Hart) level of the Puritans seems to side with the “song” of the rapper. Without apology, the “song” had as much depth to it as a children’s rhyme while the Puritans (as a whole) had a depth that our age is far from arriving at. Peter Singer writes about speciesm in our day. If the “Church” gets infatuated with that at some point and begins to judge all on that basis, all of those who eat meat today will not be read then.
It would seem that the words of the Bible regarding those in Christ would cut through a lot of this nonsense of painting with a broad brush and make us fear of stepping on our brothers in Christ (regardless of color) rather than stepping on them in order to be seen as non-racist. So much of this anti-slavery stuff in our day sure seems to be setting up new rules and regulations that the Bible and believers must bow to. It reminds me of the teaching of the Pharisees who taught that we should hate our enemies. Instead of not eating from the fruit of racism, now we are not to even touch the tree and seemingly despise any that have touched the tree though they have not eaten of the fruit.
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Mark, the two hands point was meant to follow the one in the post—on the one hand, slavery may be unjust and racism despicable, but on the other there is a lot more to social/political/historical phenomenon than moral assessment. Ditto for theocracy. In the instances of institutionalized theocracy or slavery, it often times seems like morality swallows every other dimension whole, especially among Christians.
But, you’re right, I do like the number two, as in what has two thumbs and wishes an Old Life perspective were more common?
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CD-H, you keep leaving out the city council from this. Calvin was a foreigner. The Swiss are provincial. The council removed him once, they could do it again. Whatever Calvin did he apparently had the approval of the city magistrates. If he didn’t, he’s back in Strasbourg.
BTW, I’ve too read in Kingdon’s book. I am amazed that Calvin — the dictator in your view — did not treat sexual misconduct more gravely. Our churches today are much more Puritanical.
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D.G. Hart: Our churches today are much more Puritanical.
RS: I don’t think that our churches today are like the Puritans at all. Two quotes from John Owen below to demonstrate that.
John Owen: All things that are make no addition to God, no change in His state, HIs blessedness, happiness, self-satisfaction, as well as all other infinite perfections, wre absolutely the same before the creation of anything, while there was nothing but Himself, as they are since He has made all things; for the blessedness of God consists in the ineffable mutual inbeing of the three holy Persons in the same nature, with the immanent reciprocal actings of the Father and the Son in the eternal love and complacency of the Spirit. To this nothing can be added, and no change can be made by any external work or effect of power.
Herein God acts in the perfect knowledge and perfect love of His own perfections, to an infinite acquiescency therein, which is the divine blessedness. This gives us the true notion of the divine nature prior to the manifestation of it made by any outward effects: infinite being and goodness, eternally blessed in the knowledge and enjoyment of itself by inconcievable, ineffable, internal actings, answering the manner of its subsistence, which is the three distinct Persons. (The Glory of Christ)
Our next task is to take a view of the idol himself, of this deity of free-will…Origen is supposed to have brought him first into the church; but among those many sincere worshippers of divine grace, this setter forth of new demons found but little entertainment…Now after the decease of his Pelagian worshippers, some of the corrupter schoolmen, seeing him thus from his birth exposed without shelter to wind and weather, to all assaults, out of mere charity and self-love built him a temple, and adorned it with natural lights, merits, uncontrolled independent operations, with many other gay attendances. But in the beginning of the Refomration,–that fatal time for idolatry and superstition [free-will], together with abbeys and monastaries,–the zeal and learning of our forefathers, with the help of God’s Word, demolished this temple, and brake this building down to the ground; in the rubbish whereof we well hoped the idol himself had beenso deeply buried as that his head should never more have been exalted, to the trouble of the church of God, until not long since some curious wits, whose weak stomachs were clogged with manna and loathed the sincere milk of the word, raking all the dunghills for nobelites, lighted unhappily upon this idol.” (A Display of Arminiansm(.
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What to do when our culturally entrenched sin is legal? Slavery was legal, just as abortion is today. There are some striking similarities, therefore the pro-life community uses the analogy. So, the puritans were hypocrites? Join the club, as most christians have had some moral failings in the practice what you preach department. I challenge the idea that we as christians really believe that abortion is murder, much in the same way that the puritans “believed ” that slavery was wrong. When a sin has become so entrenched in society it is the most difficult to stand against. I don’t know what the answer is, but I think our descendants may look back 200 years from now and with the same moral judgement say, “Why didn’t they do more to stop abortion?” As far as the puritans contributions to the church, if it bears the scrutiny of the scriptures, then isn’t it beneficial to those who glean from the puritans?
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Thanks, Sean, for the question. Over on the “clearwood church” thread, Jeff and I have been talking about that topic some, for the last 50 posts or so. But who has time for that?, so I will copy out a bit of my answer from there to here. Jeff thinks that if we don’t agree with the WCF notions of “visible administration”, that we simply don’t believe in any visible administration. But that is clearly wrong,.Then Jeff made some distinction between Anabaptists and Reformed Baptists, but all I think it amounted to was “bad guys like the plymouth brethren who only believe in one universal invisible church” and then “the maybe not so bad, because they say ‘the covenant’ guys”
I understand the temptation to think that the next credobaptist you meet is just like the last one you met. If you ever met one (since you were one in your former self). It sure would make it easier.
That’s why I simply pretend that all you guys are just like James Jordan. Not seriously! I respect your patience.
Here’s the quotation from the other lhread:
mark: Actually I don’t think I have as much of a problem with the visible/invvisible idea as John Murray did, and he was fervently paedobaptist. So my problem is not my being “gnostic” or pietist or
some such thing (nor did you suggest these things, you simply said–what’s your problem?).
I agree very much that the Lord knows who are His, although I also agree with what even the WCF says about assurance, so I can’t simply say “we don’t” because that would imply that we
ourselves can have no assurance. But, that said, I agree that visible congregations discern by “creditable profession of faith.’ Even though what’s in the heart tends to come out of the mouth, we judge by what comes out of the mouth.
So the problem is not “external administration” or creeds. Credobaptists judge by means of creeds and professions of faith. The problem is that we have different “external adminstrations” in mind.
You want those with professions and their children (only first generation, not exactly like in the Abrahamic covenant). I want only those with professions. But we both are going by profession. My constant suggestion has been that, if you don’t like my “external adminstration”, that hy not just baptize everybody and welcome everybody to the table, and do away with discipline all together.If you think credobaptists are being presumptuous, and confine the “visiblity” to only two marks of the church, Word and Sacrament, and forget the “profession” stuff.
Or if that still seems too “Constantinian” for you, at least baptize ALL unbelieving jews, because at least back in the time of the Abrahamic covenant, those biological seed of Abraham were all in “the covenant” (before you can break, you have to be in, don’t you?) But perhaps even that still seems a touch too “Constantinian” for you….
So Sean, the visible/ invisible distinction is not where we really differ. If we differ on something other than who are members, it would be more about local churches, with the idea that there will not be one visible gathering (ecclesia, called out) of the justified elect until Jesus Christ comes. But that’s a difference between present visibility and future visibility.
I don’t like the way you guys say that the Roman Catholic church is not the true church, but that some of what they do belongs to “the true church”. I think it would be better to talk about churches plural, covenants plural, and kingdoms plural. I guess most of you guys at least agree with me somewhat on the last one, and what Hart says about the present goodness of denominationalism fits (some) with what I think about visible congregations.
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RS asks if we should quote Richard Baxter.
The answer is no. Baxter denied particular effective atonement and proclaimed a false “neo-nomian” gospel based on our grace enabled works. And he also wrote many many stupid things about heaven and the resurrection.
I am glad he was against slavery during this time of the new covenant. But no, don’t quote Baxter, unless you do so as an example of the false gospel.
And I wouldn’t do that either. I am not going to take the pope with me on my next cruise.
Some of the puritans were “come-outers”. But as Roger Williams noticed, when they went home, some of the separatists went back to the places paid for by state tax with that prayer book and baptismal regeneration.
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McMark,
Why can’t the promise of the Seed, according to the principle of grace, opposed to the works principle inherent in the mosaic, be the point of continuity between the abrahamic and the NC(rom 4) which brings with it the same idea of familial solidarity, with the point of discontinuity being the extension of the sign of initiation to women and from circumcision to water baptism? And have the rest of the abrahamic be fulfillment in ‘true’ Israel with the requisite visible/invisible distinction?
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I know this is way off topic but I have a question for some of the frequent commentators here on OL. In my opinion the comments on OL are about as good as the articles. Anyhow, I am writing an article, hopefully for a Christian magazine, about the differences between being “Reformed and Baptist” (me), “Reformed Baptist”, and Calvinistic Baptist. Essentially, what ties the “Reformed and Baptist” to the Reformation and why being a Calvinist/4-5 pointer does not necessarily tie you to the Reformation (think SBC etc.) I know most of you guys are Presb, Reformed Church etc. so If I could maybe pick your brain on why or why not you would consider the “Reformed and Baptist” truly reformed in it’s heritage. I am not looking to debate but just to glean information, sources etc. If interested my email is bobbymo39@yahoo.com. I would love to talk to you. Thanks.
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John Sizer, I think you’re right about the evaluation of us in 200 years. That thought should humble anyone who wants to cast aspersions on German Christians under Hitler. At the same time, what to do? I don’t think John Brown is the Christian solution.
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Bobby, the comments here are as good as the posts? Wash your keyboard out with soap.
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Exactly how did we get on Calvin? I think most of the regulars here are 2K so I’m not sure how we got roped into defending his quasi-political role in Geneva in the first place. CD bristles at any mention of church discipline, apparently. Kind of like Richard and the Puritans. When D.G. used “Puritanical” in the pejorative sense to describe Calvin it was game on.
Bobby – Richard, Mark McCulley, and Crawford Gribben (google him) are your Reformed Baptist authorities here that I’ve encountered.
See also a post I wrote on “Mr. Miyagi on Cornerstone Church of Ames, Iowa’s Statement on the Doctrine of Election (And a Reformed Response)” at my blog to get a feel for the political realities of a baptist church that wants to affirm election…up to a point. These folks have a huge facility and huge bills to pay.
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CD – Be honest. Do you ever encounter anyone complaining about receiving church discipline and think, “Man you are a scumbag and I’m glad you were put under discipline.”
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Abortion is tough. It’s like trying to stop someone from cutting off their own nose. If you are so far gone you will kill your own flesh-and-blood child I have a hard time stopping you.
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Be honest. Do you ever encounter anyone complaining about receiving church discipline and think, “Man you are a scumbag and I’m glad you were put under discipline.”
Yeah. But far more often the people who have come to my site aren’t bad people. What I generally have gotten are people who are:
a) Very young, naive and inexperienced and let situations get totally out of control. Due to inexperience they took what could have been an uncomfortable situation and turned it into a total mess. Running church discipline has definitely made me strongly support the Miranda, “If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you”.
b) Mentally ill. The church is unable to deal with them, and just excommunicates them. An area where strong denominations with more depth, and thus having things like social workers on denominational staff or at least strong ties to civil structures would be better.
Scumbags tend to line up supporters or have an exit plan. Church discipline doesn’t matter much to them.
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John, if future generations will ask that question then it would seem to affirm the notion that there is indeed nothing new under the sun, namely that the penchant to morally indict dies hard. But if it’s the signature politics of today’s cultural Christianity, maybe the question won’t be asked.
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Dr. Hart – I was speaking in terms of educational and entertainment value. After re-reading that statement I hope it did not come across in a negative way or that your posts are not a product of hard study.
Erik – Thanks for the help and the article.
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dgh, I agree, John Brown is not the solution. Erik, the hardness of men’s hearts is definitely horrific to contemplate. Zrim, as far as “Christian politics” goes, I still couldn’t vote for a pro-abortion candidate, and yet I know that isn’t going to stop abortion. I find myself becoming more and more apolitical.
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Pray with me for my friend John Yeazel. Has anybody talked to him recently? I can’t reach him this week. I am not Reformed (no paedobaotism) and I am not “Baptist” (because they are nor pacifists and most of them are Arminians). But if you want to know the difference between the various franchises, I can show you the differences between John Piper and Mark Dever, the differences between Al Martin and Walt Chantry, or the differences between John Reisinger and Ernest Reisinger. But hey, I can tell you the difference between the Protestant Reformed and the United Reformed also.
Prior to the fifteenth century nobody used the word “religion” to talk about the propositions privately believed by an individual. “Religion” was thought of as activities, the social practices of people who belonged to churches. The transformation of ecclesiastically formed habits of obedience into “religious worldviews” claims to allow “the spiritual to be the spiritual, without public interference, and the public be the secular, without private prejudice.” (John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 10)
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Margaret Grey; “Dr. Hart – I was speaking in terms of educational and entertainment value. After re-reading that statement I hope it did not come across in a negative way or that your posts are not a product of hard study.”
Bud Dickman- “Yeah, I hope it didn’t come across that, that you don’t know how to read”
Bobby, this isn’t on you btw.
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Instead of becoming “apolitical”, we need to think more about what we mean by “political”. There is “government” which does not come out of the end of a gun.
You don’t have to vote in order to complain. Non-voting is not only an expression of Christian liberty but also facilitates complaint.
And also nonvoting is one more way to be self-righteous. At least I didn’t vote. I told you so. I was preemptive in my despair about the present.
“The modern view of the separation of church and state follows from a sharper discrimination between the Old and the New Testament, between the law of Moses and the gospel of Christ, and from the spirit and example of the one who said, ‘My kingdom is not from this world.'” Philip Schaff, Creeds of Christendom
“The Magisterial Reformers, for all their insights into the fallen nature of the medieval church, did not question the division of labor between ecclesiastical and civic authorities in the later Middle Ages.
To the contrary, by aligning their movements with particular states’ claims to absolute sovereignty over the political realm, as Martin Luther did in Germany, they not only shredded further the visible
unity of the body of Christ but also effectively provided ideological props for modern politics, especially its nationalistic fervor.” William Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination
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CD – I have a story to tell you at some point. Let’s just say evangelical megachurches aren’t very good at or fair with church discipline in my personal experience. It becomes much more about PR than it is about restoring the sinner.
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Bobby – ” or that your posts are not a product of hard study.”
Most of mine are the result of a tickle in my brain that I need to get rid of.
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McMark,
It was either that or Rome. I tend to give them a HUGE break on that score, while still agreeing that we would NOW want to champion something other than erastian impulses
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Mark – I was just thinking the other day I hadn’t heard anything here from John Y. in awhile. I didn’t know you were friends.
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John, are there such things as pro-abortion candidates? But careful on the apolitical trend. It’s good for churches on principle, but in persons it can be the result of having overestimated the power of politics in the first place, then when reality sets in cynicism follows. Modest expectations keep us realistic.
Don’t give Evans a foothold against 2k.
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Zrim: John, are there such things as pro-abortion candidates?
Erm, DNC platform?
‘Safe, legal, and rare’ is like, so last-millennium.
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The Swiss are provincial. The council removed him once, they could do it again. Whatever Calvin did he apparently had the approval of the city magistrates. If he didn’t, he’s back in Strasbourg.
Well yeah but that’s not uncommon for dictators, all dictators have internal supporters. People’s Council of Syria exists, strongly supports Bashar al-Assad; and Assad would easily win an election if it were held just among Alawites. Heck, most occupation governments or colonial governments have large numbers of indigenous supporters. I’m not claiming that Calvin didn’t have domestic supporters, the evidence seems consistent with his having had majority support for his program. Again the cutoff for a dictator is not that he lacks any domestic support. Castro would have easily won an election were it held in Cuba, he’s still a dictator.
And dictators are quite often deposed when their inner circle disagrees with their direction. That not infrequently happened to the Roman “dictators” from which we get the word. Heck the National Defence Commission of North Korea could probably kick Kim Jong-un to the curb. I’m not forgetting that Calvin had a ruling clique that supported him, it just isn’t relevant to his classification.
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Erik Charter:
Bobby – ” or that your posts are not a product of hard study.”
Erik Charter: Most of mine are the result of a tickle in my brain that I need to get rid of.
RS: So you admitted recently that check to see how you feel about things and now you state that you write because of a tickle in your brain. I can see why you are so hard on the Pietists now, it is because they don’t go far enough for you. The Bible speaks of those who gather teachers around them to tickle their ears, but you write in response to a tickle in your brain. It would appear that your hermeneutics could get you in a rather ticklish situation if you are not careful.
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Jeff, sorry, but none of that strikes me as wanting to see more abortions. I know it’s the party line we opposed to elective abortion are supposed to parrot, but if I don’t want my anti-abortion views characterized as “anti-choice”…
I’m surprised at you, sir ambassador.
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s: It was either that or Rome. I tend to give them a HUGE break on that score, while still agreeing that we would NOW want to champion something other than erastian impulses
mark: is this a “realpolitic” thing, like when the anarchists sided with the communists against the fascists? Did Zwingli know at the time he killed those who used to study Romans 9 with him that those anabaptists needed to be eliminated to retain the support of his magistrates? Or is that only your “Monday morning quarterback” version of the history? if so, it does not explain the alliances of Romanists with Protestants against anabaptists. It doesn’t even explain their 30 years of wars, including Protestants against Protestants.
Interesting move though–defend the unrevised Confessions, despite approving the revisions. You do know that some folks want to revise the revisions and go back to the Confessional way as it used to be, or at least to the administration of the Confessions. The Confession are addressed to magistrates The Confessions are written for the sake of Magistrates.
But Trent never changed. And Westminster did (a little tiny bit). Now we keep the nationalism out of the church and leave it to private Christians.
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Mark,
It’s just more realizing the best we do in this life is proximate justice, and often that poorly. It’s the whole limitation of being the creature , and a fallen one at that, and not the creator. Thank God for Jesus Christ, may He come quickly.
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Richard – That’s on my personal blog. All of my theological posts here are made only after thorough prayer and research in my vast theological library. Either that or whatever the first thing is that comes into my head.
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Zrim, I would say that any candidate that supports a woman’s right to kill her own child is pro-abortion in my book. You are right that abortion has been been politicized but that’s all part of the acceptance of this heinous sin our society. Everything hinges on a legal status or lack thereof, for the slave and the unborn child. I am tired of the pandering in politics when I don’t see a whole lotta difference between the candidates. Let’s be real here, the “conservatives” are not going to do anything to overturn Roe v. Wade despite all their pandering to the Christian base. Foreign policy is basically the same for each side.(I have two boys in the military) Same goes for their economic policies for the most part despite their blustering. Maybe I did put too much stock in the political process, now I don’t see anything good coming from it. So,yes, come quickly Lord Jesus and please remember mercy in your judgement.
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CD-H, your point might make more sense if you offered evidence rather than naming a cast of contemporary dictators. You sound like an editor at the Boston Weekly.
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I’m prochoice. But in 2011 over 1000 anti-abortion measures were introduced at the state level with over 100 passing. Same record is likely for 2012. I’m a little hard pressed to see how conservatives haven’t delivered on their prolife promises. Abortion is de-facto illegal or unavailable in most states and counties except for the 20% or so with liberal majorities.
The legal situation we have today is more or less what the country would look like if Roe were overturned. What more are conservative legislators supposed to do? About a quarter of the population of the country is strongly pro-choice and they live in concentrated areas, not dispersed. Assume abortion were technically illegal everywhere. You’d have prochoice cops, but even assuming there were a few prolifers they arrest someone and bring them before a prochoice DA. Even assuming the DA didn’t drop the case, the DA would be scheduling the trial with a prochoice clerk who makes sure the case goes before a prochoice judge. During jury selection the DA would be confronted with trying to choose between having about 3 active members from organizations: NARAL, NOW, American Humanist Association, the Green Party, Moveon, ACLU, a subscriber to the Nation…
What more can they do beyond what they’ve done?
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CD-H, your point might make more sense if you offered evidence rather than naming a cast of contemporary dictators
The contemporary dictators are the evidence.
A: Calvin had property X
B: Dictator Y had property X
therefore property X doesn’t disqualify Calvin from being a dictator.
My disagreement with the argument presented is that the criteria you are using to exclude Calvin would exclude most other dictators. The evidence is clear cut.
a) In multiple cases before the consistory Calvin introduced novel new laws.
b) The Consistory’s ruling were enforced using state power via. the council
ergo Calvin could effectively create and enforce law, acting in place of a legislature.
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CD-host, just curious about your pro-choice stance, what rationale can you find for allowing a woman to kill her child? What more could legislators do? At one time, maybe something. Probably nothing now because as a society we have come to embrace our sin as something distasteful but necessary. We won’t see abortion made illegal in our lifetime. Over 40 million children killed since Roe v. Wade here in the states. We have yet to feel the full impact of such a great atrocity. We (as a nation) will have to answer for it.
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CD-H, what’s the difference between a “new law” and a “novel new law”?
What you describe is true of most European cities. Clerics everywhere could discipline citizens and the state carried out the civil sanctions. The difference with dictators is that most actually carry a gun or rule the military.
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But, John, when I oppose the right of one segment of the human population to decide the life and death of another segment at will or whim simply because the former houses the latter, it’s not really fair to character my opposition as anti-choice. The other side of the table really isn’t looking to see more abortions happen. They are wanting to protect the rights of some people to decide their lot. Granted, the upshot of their views gives cover to the aforementioned right to will and whim.
But this is the problem of framing the whole conversation in terms of individual rights instead of obligations to others–it ends up pitting two American virtues of life and liberty, and we are forced to (ahem) decide between two parties who are casting each other as either baby killers or misogynists. Doesn’t that seem unsatisfactory to you? Don’t you think Robert Bork was right to say that the whole “abortion issue has produced divisions and bitterness in our politics that countries don’t have”?
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@john
CD-host, just curious about your pro-choice stance, what rationale can you find for allowing a woman to kill her child?
I don’t believe an embryo is a child structurally, it is not remotely human. I think a fetus is clearly a mammalian primate, but not human yet either. That is I think there is a difference between potential and actual. A lottery ticket might be potentially be worth forty-million but in actuality once the numbers are chosen it is likely worth nothing.
I more or less believe the traditional Christian doctrine (in more modern language) that the fetus goes through 3 stages: vegetative soul, animal soul and intellectual (human) soul. Or to update the language: a fetus starts as non differentiated matter, differentiates into a primate and then develops into a human. Human fetuses have non human characteristics until very late, and they lack human characteristics until very late. I have far more in common with an adult chimpanzee than I do with a human fetus until at the earliest somewhere in the late 7th month.
If I were to nail your body with RNA from a chicken you would die. If I were to take a egg from a human female, fertilize it with human sperm, nail it with RNA from a chicken and keep doing that for 3 weeks, I’d get a chick. Ergo the fetus is neither chicken nor human at that point it hasn’t differentiated itself yet.
What more could legislators do? At one time, maybe something. Probably nothing now because as a society we have come to embrace our sin as something distasteful but necessary. We won’t see abortion made illegal in our lifetime.
You are actually somewhat proving my point. In the last 2 years, there has been a huge shift towards making it illegal. On the ground the prolife causes has had huge success. What exists today in the south, with the exception of a few large cities is what illegal abortion looks like. This is it, this is victory. I’m sort of speechless in how dissatisfied prolifers are with the last 2 years. What did you think you were fighting for in trying to make abortion illegal?
There is a great book: when abortion was a crime available free online. When abortion was illegal it was illegal in the sense that prostitution is now illegal. not in the sense that armed robbery is illegal.
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THABITI ANYABWILE has a very interesting recent essay against voting for the lesser of two evils.
http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/thabitianyabwile/2012/10/03/w-e-b-dubois-would-not-vote-in-this-election/
But his idealism is compromised by his praise of Abraham Lincoln.
they don’t make candidates for president the way they used to
it must not be nice not to have to think about how many Lincoln
killed to make us all free
Oh, you get it but you don’t get it.
Oh, that we can go back to an America that once were, founded on Christian values.
They don’t build preachers like they used to.
It must be nice to not have to consider race.
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McMark, and what would W.E.B. DuBois say about rap?
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CD-H, what’s the difference between a “new law” and a “novel new law”?
Whether the law was merely a refinement of existing law or something created from scratch. For example in the USA we have a common law system where judges effectively create new law when they decide how to apply existing law to new situations. What they aren’t supposed to be doing, what we leave up to our legislators is creating law not from some other legal basis but rather because their is a social need to be addressed.
What you describe is true of most European cities. Clerics everywhere could discipline citizens and the state carried out the civil sanctions.
I agree. But in most European cities the nobility were indifferent to church discipline. While in theory they could prosecute they mostly choose not to. That was quite different in Calvin’s Geneva where escalation to the Council would almost always result in harsh secular punishment, which made the rulings of the Consistory effectively under duress.
A good analogy of this is Khomeini’s treatment of Iran’s Jews. Khomeini backed Rabbinic law with state violence, so for example violating the Jewish sabbath could get a Jew taken before a firing squad. The effect was to change the relationship between the beis din which is designed for believing obedient Jews to help on issues on genuine dispute and turn it into a court which had to act with support of state terror on non-observant Jews.
No question, dictatorships were common, and strongly supported in Calvin’s time. What was uncommon about Calvin was a sort of proto-totalitarianism. Unlike most dictators which are mostly indifferent to the day to day lives of their population, Calvin dictatorship wanted to involve itself in daily life and even the thoughts of his subject population. There are very few examples of dictators that have setup the kind of massive domestic spy rings concerning themselves with the most petty details of their subject’s lives as Calvin did.
What is controversial about Calvin was not his rulings within the church but rather a consistent policy of using state terror towards unbelievers to change their religious beliefs. Most European leaders in Calvin’s time could care less what their subject populations believed. They might be willing to tolerate some degree of persecution of heretics to prevent civil unrest but they never setup a mechanism for the constant intervention into daily life that Calvin did.
The difference with dictators is that most actually carry a gun or rule the military.
Again I’ll give counter examples. Bashar al-Assad doesn’t carry a gun, and he is a doctor focused on reforming the Syrian banking system. Ali Khamenei supreme leader of Iran never carries a gun. China has 3 divisions and the head of the Communist party is absolute not the head of the People’s Liberation Army.
Military dictatorships are a specific kind of dictatorship but generally those are a result of a civilian government having failed. Dictators can arise where the civilian bureaucracy is perfectly functional.
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Zrim, I think a big part of the problem is that we have allowed the opposition to frame the terms of the debate. When did become a matter of “choice” or “reproductive rights”? The term “unwanted pregnancies” is surely a sign of a self-absorbed culture. The reality is not so much a political fight as it is a woman’s fight against nature.
CD-host, I don’t think the lottery ticket analogy is very helpful. The fetus left to the natural processes of pregnancy will always be a human baby. The actions you describe are against nature’s natural processes. I am hard pressed from a scriptural standpoint to see your traditional christian view of the baby in the womb. From God saying “I knew you in the womb and he formed our innermost parts” to the judgements against someone who inflicts harm or death on a pregnant woman and her baby. Your view seems progressively a very liberal christian view. DG, if I can paraphrase a quote from Mother Teresa : ” Any society that is capable of allowing a mother to kill her own child is capable of the most unspeakable evil. ” ( I believe she said that at a prayer breakfast hosted by Bill and Hilary Clinton.) By the way I can’t stand rap!
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CD-Host: I don’t believe an embryo is a child structurally, it is not remotely human.
That’s a remarkable claim. Are there any embryology texts that speak in this way?
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John, it’s a fair enough point about the opposition. At the same time, the so-called right-to-life can have an unchecked tendency to feed modern notions about the right of one class of human beings not to have to suffer the pains and injuries of being human, up to and including death. In other words, an idolizing of both youth and life, the latter of which Jesus told us to hate lest it diminishes eternal perspective. I just find it curious that otherwise conservative Calvinists, who should have an abiding sense of sin and otherworldliness, rarely detect these glaring problems in pro-lifery.
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Zrim, wow, that one class of human beings is totally defenseless. They are truly orphans in every sense of the word. Is that what abortion cones down to, a baby suffering the pains and injury of being human? Should the Christian community respond with, “Well, that’s life !” That doesn’t seem very loving to my neighbor. I will grant you all the pro-life movement short-comings, but at the end of the day to me the issue is still primarily moral and not political. That we have allowed it to become a political issue, well, that makes it more difficult. Again, I think mother’s real opponent is nature and she is not going to win that battle.
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To follow up. If I bombard beryllium atoms with helium nuclei, I get carbon atoms.
But this fact in no way proves or suggests that beryllium is “not yet beryllium.”
Likewise, the fact that human cells can be overwhelmed with chicken RNA and result in chicken embryos (very interesting research, BTW. Do you have a link to the paper?), does not prove that the cells are “not yet human.”
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CD-H, you mean no European cared what Jews wore or where they lived?
What you still haven’t proved is that church discipline became something with a civil penalty attached. Granted, segregating the church and civil realms would have been hard. But that’s not a problem that Geneva faced alone. Just because Calvin wanted a reformed church, which had repercussions for the civil Constantinian order shared by all of Europe, doesn’t make him controversial. The controversy is the interpenetration of religion and politics in Christendom at large. As long as you have that, you have the possibility for church discipline bleeding into civil penalties.
Bottom line: you are way to selective in judging Calvin a dictator. If a Roman Catholic has to move out of a town or region to practice his faith — or else get executed — a Lutheran pastor or Anglican priest is a dictator (on your odd definition).
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@john —
I don’t think the lottery ticket analogy is very helpful. The fetus left to the natural processes of pregnancy will always be a human baby.
Just as an aside I think you meant embryo here (at fertilization) not fetus (at 11 weeks). If we are talking about fetuses only then we are mostly agreeing on 1st trimester abortion, which I assume was not your intent.
But let me build on this accident, lets take the lungs for example. Left to their own devices the lungs in a fetus would die, they wouldn’t develop at all. The muscle system of the fetus, which developed earlier, has to exercise them to help them develop to the level of being functional lungs that can operate with a mammalian heart. At 11 weeks they are tissue organized into non functional lungs in the shape and structure of mammalian lungs; though there is nothing explicitly human about them at that point. Their “natural state” that is what happens to them without intervention is to become dead tissue, it requires extensive intervention for them to become human lungs.
Much the same way that neither my fingers nor my computer wrote the response to this post but rather they acted cooperatively. Were I to hit those lungs with chicken RNA they would die, just like your lungs would. Something really important has happened between 11 hours and 11 weeks. And something more will have to happen over the next few weeks to finally create functional human lungs. And I find the prolife argument that nothing meaningful happened between 11 hours and 17 weeks too hard to believe.
Now over and above that, let me just point out the most common result of fertilization is not a health baby but an implantation failure that washes out with the woman’s next menstrual cycle. If every fertilization were fully human sexually active fertile couples do a few involuntary manslaughters every year. Or to quote NARAL, under that definition every woman’s uterus is a slaughterhouse.
The actions you describe are against nature’s natural processes.
No they aren’t. That’t the point. There is no difference between an 11 hour embryo produced by human parents and an 11 hour embryo produced by chicken parents. The only difference is the DNA package they contain. Replace the package and you complete change the organism. And just to cut off the “DNA” makes you human. You and I lose about 1 gram of skin cells, a few billion biologically complete DNA collections every day. If DNA makes humans you’ve kill the entire population of the earth twice over every week. The most reasonable biological definition that seems to correspond to our legal / social usage is human bodily structures, not DNA.
I am hard pressed from a scriptural standpoint to see your traditional christian view of the baby in the womb. From God saying “I knew you in the womb and he formed our innermost parts”
In scripture God also knows us from the beginning of time, so let’s put that aside as just begging the question. The more interesting question is since you believe in a human soul. Do humans via. sex create human souls or does God create human souls? For example do identical twins share a single soul or do they have individual souls? And if they have individual souls then ensoulment cannot be the product of sex. Ensoulment has to happen sometime after sex. And quite a bit after as an identical twin can break off until about the 3rd week. My belief is that scripture is pretty explicit that all individuals have an individual soul, and that it was created by God not by their parents, hence not by sex.
to the judgements against someone who inflicts harm or death on a pregnant woman and her baby.
We have no idea what the definition of pregnancy was in biblical times. We know that during the 19th century our definition changed. Generally a woman wasn’t considered fully pregnant until quickening (detection of fetal movement) which is 18-22 weeks. That’s why in the 17th, 18th and early 19th century you have common frequent “restoration of menses”, what we would today call 1st and early 2nd trimester chemical abortion, that wasn’t controversial. 150 years ago, a woman who “aborted” in the modern sense would have been considered to be using contraception, not guilty of abortion. The 19th century anti-contraception movement adopted the medical definition of pregnancy to the social and legal realm so as to attack contraception. Though interestingly in the last few decades religious conservatives have decided to disagree with the medical definition and want to declare pregnancy at fertilization not implantation.
So with that background, no I have no reason to believe the bible agrees with your positions.
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@DGH
Bottom line: you are way to selective in judging Calvin a dictator. If a Roman Catholic has to move out of a town or region to practice his faith — or else get executed — a Lutheran pastor or Anglican priest is a dictator (on your odd definition).
No. Remember the definition of dictator was the ability to create law. The Anglican church had limited authority over its own doctrines, and did not have its penalties upheld by civil courts. In England religious offenses that were going to carry civil penalties were tried in secular courts on matters of fact and again most religious offenses were simply ignored by secular authorities. If you want to call Henry VIII, Mary, Elizabeth I… dictators I’d agree.
Lutheran princes were dictators. Lutheran ministers mostly were not because they lacked any meaningful power. Calvin isn’t in the same boat because he did have meaningful power.
What you still haven’t proved is that church discipline became something with a civil penalty attached.
Sure since you have Kingdon’s book: Marie de la Maisonneuve who had digital sex (AFAICT the consistory calls this “putting his hand under her dress”) with Rollet des Noyers with her husband Jean Beatrix’s permission. More or less a “if you don’t make a fuss about my mistress you can take a lover” type arrangement. All four parties seemed content with this arrangement though Calvin needs to say disagreed. Because Marie was known to making mocking comments about the consistory she was imprisoned until she agreed to their punishment, begging her husband for forgiveness for imprudence.
Whether this sort of arrangement was permissible or not was a consistory ruling enforced with the full power of the state. When the affair resumed Marie was threatened with life imprisonment for adultery.
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That’s a remarkable claim. Are there any embryology texts that speak in this way?
Human is a legal / definition. I don’t read embryology texts but I’d assume essentially all of them discuss how the cells aren’t differentiated yet.
To follow up. If I bombard beryllium atoms with helium nuclei, I get carbon atoms. But this fact in no way proves or suggests that beryllium is “not yet beryllium.”
That’s not the analogy. Berryllium atoms are beryllium. The analogy might be that hydrogen left to its devices will bond with oxygen in the atmosphere and form water. However, if I expose hydrogen to fluorine I get hydrogen fluoride. Which is a different reaction then I get if I expose water to fluorine. Hence, hydrogen is not water.
Likewise, the fact that human cells can be overwhelmed with chicken RNA
You are begging the question. What makes the embryo cells human cells? Humans don’t have those kinds of cells.
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CD-H, perhaps you’ve heard of Jerry Sundusky? Perhaps you’ve heard of treason laws? Our secular politicians still lock people up for insubordination and loose morals. All state power is a form of dictatorship. Are you an Anabaptist?
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CD-Host: What makes the embryo cells human cells?
Their genetic code.
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John, agreed they are defenseless and weak, but also children of wrath. I’m looking for more than polite acknowledgments of imperfection in the movement and a little more serious regard for what it means to be the latter. Sometimes weak and defenseless die, sometimes as a result of natural causes and sometimes from human policy. Nobody likes it, but it’s never going away. That doesn’t mean anybody is unloving toward his weak and defenseless neighbor, just realistic about the way things work.
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CD-H, perhaps you’ve heard of Jerry Sundusky?
Jerry Sandusky was tried under the laws of the state of Pennsylvania by a Pennsylvania court. The legislature passed the laws against adult child sexual contact. Hence no dictators.
Our secular politicians still lock people up for insubordination and loose morals.
I agree they do that. Your claim before was that Calvin couldn’t do that.
All state power is a form of dictatorship.
No it isn’t. A dictatorship requires a single individual capable of acting in place of a legislature to make law. If there is a legislature that is the body of lawmaking then it isn’t a dictatorship, by definition.
Calvin could create law
That law was enforced by state power
that’s it. That’s what makes him a dictator nothing more complex than those two statements. I’m not sure why you are objecting to this obvious application of the dictionary definition. I’d go further and say given the nature of the types of laws that he sought to impose he was a totalitarian dictator.
John Calvin preached two kingdoms, but inconsistently and in the territory where he held power he implemented full blown theocracy to a degree well beyond what Khomeini did. Geneva read correctly frankly provides a wonderful example of the futility of one kingdom.
In a place with strong support for Orthodox Reformed Churches.
After having expelled people who openly disagreed with him.
With strong popular support for state terror to undermine opposition.
With ministers who more or less had tremendous personal integrity and were not corrupt.
One Kingdom failed. If it is going to fail under those conditions, how well it work under anything remotely like what it would look like in the US?
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CD-Host: What makes the embryo cells human cells?
Jeff: Their genetic code.
That can’t be it. We manufacture all sorts of drugs by injecting bacteria with human DNA strands. That doesn’t make them humans.
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You asked me what made human cells to be human. That’s not the same as recombinant modification of bacterial DNA.
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CD-H, in case you haven’t noticed Stalin is not well regarded. Does he qualify as dictator? Most would say he is. You call Calvin a dictator and lots of people are surprised. Theocrat is one thing (though not precise). Dictator is like racist.
So here’s the evidence you supplied for Calvin “making up” law:
First, I don’t find any of those names in the index (really).
Second, how is adultery a “made up” law?
Third, how is mocking church authorities a “made up” law?
Where in Europe, the Ottoman Empire, or Russia, were laws against adultery or mocking ruling authorities novel?
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Zrim, so the response is, “Well, that’s life!” That certainly does seem to be the reality by looking at our acceptance of it. It would seem that we have become hardened and callous to the plight of the unborn. CD- host, obviously I believe God is the creator of souls. I don’t have any more knowledge of how God does this anymore than you do. It’s not something that can be measured, so I am content to leave that as a mystery. Any way you try to explain it, is pure speculation. As far as natural processes go, it is not natural to bombard human cells with chicken RNA. That is definitely rather ghoulish. An embryo, left in the womb to the natural process of a human pregnancy will always be a human baby. As far as miscarriages go, they are still determined by nature and nature’s God. Manslaughter still requires the guilty party to be involved in some type of risky activity that causes another party to die. I would say the woman doesn’t usually engage those types of dangerous activities.
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Anyone who has been in the delivery room when the baby emerges should have a hard time doubting that it is a valuable human life growing inside the mother. You can try to get all technical about it, but it reveals some bad things about the state of the denier’s soul, in my opinion. It’s definitely a symptom of being “given over”, as the Apostle Paul would say. I would find liberals to be more credible if they were consistent on life and “welfare” from conception to natural death. Too often their desire for “sexual freedom” trumps all else, however. Very sad.
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@DGH
So here’s the evidence you supplied for Calvin “making up” law:
No the Marie de la Maisonneuve case was the evidence I supplied for Calvin . the consistory exercising secular power. It is from Adultery and Divorce p, 98-115, I wanted to pick a case with lots of detail. At that point you were denying that church discipline was being enforced by the secular courts.
If you want an example of new law, and one rather important at that: ordinances concerning marriages passed in 1545 but evidently in force earlier (see footnote 56 p 15). Catholic law had been that marriage was sacramental between the parties, so for example slaves could marry without their master’s consent. Calvin evidently objected and put in place a policy that father’s had the exclusive right to contract marriages. It is frankly hard to imagine a law more oppressive.
Dictator is like racist.
Well yes and most of the synonyms are negative too. We live in America and Democracy is a secular religion. I agree it is a negative term, but it is a negative term because Americans reject the type of government that Calvin created. Dictator may be negative, it is also accurate.
To modern eyes, Calvin’s Geneva was a brutal place. I don’t think as a political leader Calvin should be well regarded if we examine him in modern terms. Even excuses like “he was a man of his times” don’t hold up, since he was considerably worse to his domestic population than most men of his time. What Calvin provides, for most Americans, is not an example, of good government but a lessen in the futility of theocratic totalitarianism. Even with “the right religion”, even with the the right kinds of officials the state went well beyond what is its rightful role in modern terms. The system we have today, for all its failings, does prevent what Calvin created.
By the same token Calvin attracted a surge in immigration. People came from all over Europe to live in his totalitarian state. So someone who wishes to make a positive case for Calvin’s particular brand of totalitarian dictatorship can do so. You are a historian, you shouldn’t be squirming in calling Calvin what he was.
Where in Europe, the Ottoman Empire, or Russia, were laws against adultery or mocking ruling authorities novel?
See above I wasn’t claiming anti-adultery laws were novel. Though enforcement of adultery laws on the type of agreed to affairs as per the arie de la Maisonneuve is rather novel. To pick a counter example. England, London in particular, at the time of Calvin was swimming in prostitutes and most men had mistresses. Wives, in the courtly love system were expected to take a younger lover once they had gone through the rapid breeding of their early marriages. During Calvin’s time there an explosion of syphilis and vendors selling condoms began to appear in most cities. If having businesses whose sole function was to facilitate adultery is not state sanction what would be?
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@john —
Manslaughter still requires the guilty party to be involved in some type of risky activity that causes another party to die. I would say the woman doesn’t usually engage those types of dangerous activities.
Actually they do. Having sex later in the menstrual cycle is far and away the #1 cause of implantation failures. With couples who practices NFP, and are young and thus highly fertile calling their regular killings involuntary manslaughter might be rather generous.
The reason you are objecting is because deep down the notion that a fertilized egg should really be treated like a new born infant where a death would certainly warrant an investigation into the parents is ludicrous.
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John, no, the point isn’t to be cavalier. And while some may worry that others have become hardened and callous to the plight of the unborn, my worry is that some are saying that if others don’t care the way they do then they don’t care at all.
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CD-host, I have never heard that sex causes miscarriages, could you give me a link? I have 9 children and my wife has never miscarried. Her Ob-Gyn has always encouraged a regular sexual activity throughout the pregnancy because the baby is not at risk. You are right that I think it’s ludicrous to hold the mother responsible for the miscarriage because she cannot determine the course of nature. I believe that a miscarriage is something that occurs in nature as opposed to an abortion that happens when the natural pregnancy process is terminated by the hand of man. I get where you are coming from, you don’t believe the embryo is human. I just don’t agree with you. There are lots of questions neither you nor I can answer, such as when God creates the soul. I believe it happens at conception but I can’t prove anything scientifically. Was John the Baptist fully human when he leapt in his mother’s womb at the presence of Christ in Mary’s womb? Was the Lord Jesus at that point? Where do you make that distinction scientifically? All of the development of baby that you talked about in your post (about the lung development, etc.) just speaks to me of how we are fearfully and wonderfully made. At what point are we denigrating the image of God?
Zrim, I sympathize with your concern having been involved in the pro-life movement for some time. Like any other movement it can and does breed a self-righteousness. I know there are many Christians who care as much as I do but don’t express it in the same way as i do. That’s okay they need to do what their conscious dictates for them, I have no desire to stand in judgement of my brother who is God’s servant. I guess I am just coming to grips with the state of affairs in this country on all fronts. It seems that all of those issues that once seem settled inside the camp (church) are now being debated in the camp. Sorry to vent, I guess I have just grown weary. I appreciate you taking the time to dialogue.
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“Actually they do. Having sex later in the menstrual cycle is far and away the #1 cause of implantation failures. With couples who practices NFP, and are young and thus highly fertile calling their regular killings involuntary manslaughter might be rather generous.”
CD, you can be very reasonable at times but now you’re just being a twit.
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Well, CD, here’s my view.
First, being human is a question of species. The DNA of your every cell can be measured for distance from other humans. The fact that humans form a distinct species means that the genetic distance from you to any other human being is substantially smaller than your distance to any other individual.
So from a genetic point of view — the point of view that counts amongst biologists — you have substantially much more in common with an embryo than with an ape.
What about some kind of hybrid, a human-pig or human-bacterium? Currently, none of those are viable. So it’s an interesting theoretical question, but not a bridge we have to cross at this time. The recombinant bacteria you mention above are, to my knowledge, substantially bacterial with a single human gene inserted for the purposes of creating a single specific protein. No biologist worries about whether they might be human.
So my understanding of the science is that biologists would use genetics to define “being human.” And embryologists would say that the beginning of life for an organism is fertilization. So for me, the science is a slam dunk: genetically human, biologically living organism.
Now, you may not concede that all human beings have equal rights. You seem to indicate above that embryos are less worthy of protection because they don’t “look human.” That’s a matter of moral opinion, and I won’t argue it.
Nevertheless, the scientific definition of being “human” is not a matter of opinion, but is defined by genetics.
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CD-Host: Actually they do. Having sex later in the menstrual cycle is far and away the #1 cause of implantation failures.
If I’m reading you correctly, you are saying that if a couple fertilizes late in the cycle, there is a good chance of failure to implant, so that conceiving late in the cycle is a large risk factor for subsequently miscarrying.
CD-Host: The reason you are objecting is because deep down the notion that a fertilized egg should really be treated like a new born infant where a death would certainly warrant an investigation into the parents is ludicrous.
The “deep down” thing is just incorrect. Many people I know (as in, “I know a guy…”) choose contraceptive methods based on risk to embryos.
Here’s a better reason to object: we accept that reasonable activities carry risk. We don’t prosecute parents for driving down the road with children in the back, even though that’s a risk factor for injury and death. Nor for having a properly maintained swimming pool or a trampoline, even though each of those is a risk factor.
Nor then should we prosecute couples for engaging in normal activities with potentially risky side-effects.
Here’s an even better reason not to prosecute: inability to collect evidence without substantial intrusion into rights.
Judge: “How do you know that a crime was committed?”
Prosecutor: “We collected this woman’s sanitation products for eight years and analyzed them for embryo remains.”
Really.
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John —
BTW I said late sex causes implantation failure not that sex while pregnant causes miscarriage. The study is http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199906103402304#t=articleResults
Congratulations on 9 kids. That’s an unfathomable amount of work.
I believe [ensoulment] happens at conception
BTW I wasn’t asking you to prove your position, just state it and deal with the logical consequences of it. In particular the obvious problem that under this theory identical twins share a single soul.
There are lots of questions neither you nor I can answer, such as when God creates the soul.
I have no trouble answering this from a Christian perspective. I don’t believe in the soul, but I think Christian doctrine is pretty clear on this. The doctrine that the pro-life movement preaches is a Christian heresy called Traducianism, that sex creates the intellectual soul (i.e. the human soul). I think the Christian position, if one is going to give any weight to tradition, is precisely the tradition that existed in the USA and Christendom prior to the 19th century anti-contraception movement, that a zygote or embryo is at that point spiritually nothing more than menses mixed with sperm. You were quite cavalier about the issue of lungs not being developed. However, the bible uses breathe as the very essence of life in a thousands of places. If one is going to take the bible seriously this is one of the most consistently taught doctrines. Anything incapable of breathing is not in the biblical sense a living animal at all.
Lungs develop around the same time the mother detects fetal movement. Quickening, when the mother first detects fetal movement happens at 18-22 week, and thus the traditional cutoff seems fully in accord with the fetus being biblically alive. This interpretation, coincides with the traditional Christian definition of the animal soul being present at around 4 months after conception when detectable fetal movement occurs.
The last question is when the intellectual soul is created. And since Christianity has until recently been unequivocal in its support for a bodily resurrection, that a human soul requires a human body that means 8 months after conception. At 8 months two things both happen:
a) The fetus no longer has any non human traits, for example it now has hair not fur.
b) The brain structures which are uniquely human start to form. At 8 months the fetus has an immature human brain rather than a non human brain.
So I think if one were going to assume ensoulment ever happens it happens at 8 months. That is, I think the Christian fathers, thought about this problem and came to the correct conclusions, conclusions that are fully consistent with the biological evidence we now have. My position stands in full accord with Christian tradition and before that Western tradition.
And this position allows for something that can be applied in a sensible way. Everyone wants to treat 20 year old Chevonne Thomas who decapitated her 2 year old differently than a woman who procures an abortion. Everyone wants to treat a child who dies at birth, differently than a fertilized egg contained in the monthly menstrual discharge. Using the bible rather than the currently fashionable pro-life position allow one to treat abortion after 8 months as infanticide while treating the frequent implantation failures at 3 days as being of little or moral consequence.
As for comment about Jesus not being human. Christian doctrine holds that Jesus pre-existed Mary’s pregnancy. He clearly wasn’t in a bodily sense human 1 year before she became pregnant according to orthodox Christianity. So I don’t see any problem with asserting that he became bodily human at any point thereafter.
As for John the Baptist jumping, if Elizabeth could feel movement this was after quickening and thus doesn’t provide a counter example.
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@Jeff
If I’m reading you correctly, you are saying that if a couple fertilizes late in the cycle, there is a good chance of failure to implant, so that conceiving late in the cycle is a large risk factor for subsequently miscarrying.
Correct. And let me just get specific from the NIH’s data:
3% by day 9 after ovulation
26% on day 10
52% on day 11
86% on day 12 or more
The “deep down” thing is just incorrect. Many people I know (as in, “I know a guy…”) choose contraceptive methods based on risk to embryos.
I agree that Christians are becoming quite concerned with abortifacient drugs. Their intent is to reduce accidental abortion. I’m not saying Christians are completely hypocritical on these issues. You only need look at the data from blue states and red states to see massive differences in procreative patterns, to see that evangelical Christians are trying to live their beliefs to some extent. But that is very different from going all the way to what their ideology would actually require.
As an aside I’m not entirely sure about whether they are in practice successful. Some move towards NFP (Natural Family Planning) which ironically is far more likely than the commonly used chemical methods to induce abortions, though I agree this is an error of ignorance not intent. Others use combinations like barrier methods plus spermicides which have high failure rates, yet we don’t have correspondingly high birth rates for a population using such unreliable methods.
Here’s a better reason to object: we accept that reasonable activities carry risk.
I agree but the definition of “reasonable” would change substantially if we assume that every fertilized egg is really and truly human. Under that definition having sex late in the menstrual cycle since it carries grave risk of death would not be a reasonable activity.
Nor for having a properly maintained swimming pool or a trampoline, even though each of those is a risk factor.
Note you had to qualify that with properly maintained swimming pool because of course we do prosecute for unmaintained swimming pools precisely because they are a risk factor though nowhere near the risk factor of late sex.
Here’s an even better reason not to prosecute: inability to collect evidence without substantial intrusion into rights.
That state has no problem intruding into rights in evidence collection when it comes to homicide investigations. They believe they have an compelling state interest in preventing homicides. They also have a compelling state interest in preventing accidental death. If every zygote is fully human, they would have an equal interest in collecting woman’s sanitation products.
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I am a big fan of Old Life. In fact, it is about the only blog I read (sometimes I read Kevin DeYoung, and every once in a while a few more, but mostly just Old Life). I hadn’t read any of the buzz on Propaganda until I read your blog, though I have heard the song.
After reading your post, though, I think you missed his point. The point of the song is precisely against the kind of cultural perfectionism that you mention.
The end of the song goes like this:
“It’s the same feeling I get when people quote me.
Like, if you only knew!
I get it. But I don’t get it.
Ask my wife.
And, it bothers me when you quote puritans, if I’m honest, for the same reason it bothers me when people quote me–they precious propaganda.
So, I guess it’s true.
God really does use crooked sticks to make straight lines.
Just like your precious puritans.”
While searching for the lyrics online, I also came upon this quote from Propaganda (at http://www.joethorn.net/2012/09/25/precious-puritans-pt-2/):
“The song was really designed to be a bait and switch. The indictment on the puritans is really a secondary point. They were not perfect in living out their theology. They had issues just like all of us. And I’m just as much guilty as them. The real point is the last line, “God uses crooked sticks to make straight lines.” God uses us despite our depravity. That’s the main point…I’m guilty too!”
I don’t disagree that there is a lack of nuance in the comments on the puritans, and yet that lack of nuance itself is indicted in the end when Propaganda says, basically, Oh, by the way, we are all just as screwed up as them, praise God He uses us anyway. The end forces you to go back and say, okay, maybe the Puritans were as bad as this seems, but God has used them and can use them just the same as He might use anyone else. Which means, of course, maybe it is okay to quote them after all. Because, after all, not even “the Bible’s saints could withstand our moral rectitude.” Or, as Propaganda puts it,
“So, I guess it’s true.
God really does use crooked sticks to make straight lines.
Just like your precious puritans.”
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@Jeff —
I’m disagreeing with the genetic definition that genes are what matters. If genes are all that matters and not structures you run into all sorts of complexities. So no, I don’t think that’s a slam dunk at all. As I mentioned you and I lose a gram of skin, a few billion cells which are complete genetic copies of ourselves. We do not invest these cells human rights and treat them as we would treat an identical twin. At the very least we examine complete organisms, and organisms have structures not just genes.
At fertilization and for days thereafter zygotes contain human genes in non human cells. Which means they are arguably less human than those skin cells, which are human genes in human cells. Now at this point you I’d assume you would argue because the zygote is an organism, that even though it is structurally non-human the genes make it human.
OK lets assume that were true. Cancers have human genes, but because they exist in non human cells types we treat them as non-human. Under your definition that even cell structure doesn’t matter, why wouldn’t a tumor be human?
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However, the bible uses breathe as the very essence of life in a thousands of places. If one is going to take the bible seriously this is one of the most consistently taught doctrines. Anything incapable of breathing is not in the biblical sense a living animal at all. Lungs develop around the same time the mother detects fetal movement. Quickening, when the mother first detects fetal movement happens at 18-22 week, and thus the traditional cutoff seems fully in accord with the fetus being biblically alive.
CDH, thanks for demonstrating the foibles of using the Bible to make scientific points. Yours is to bolster choice politics, lifers use Psalm 139. But either way, that’s not the Bible’s function. Per Jesus, it’s all about him. When they use the Bible to settle scientific claims, do lifers and choicers ever realize how they sound like a light beer commercial–less filling, tastes great!
But this also isn’t to say the Bible is irrelevant to the discussion, just to say that the sixth and second greatest commandments have more relevancy than your biblical logic or Psalm 139 proof-texting.
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CD-Host: That state has no problem intruding into rights in evidence collection when it comes to homicide investigations.
I think you’re misunderstanding the argument. The state does not actually investigate every death. Even more so, the state does not spend any resources investigating hypothetical deaths.
The only way to establish that a given embryo had even died — that there was even a given embryo on the first place — would be to first put in place an amazing intrusive regime of personal information collection.
This is very different from having a corpse in hand and investigating how the person in question died.
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CD-Host: As I mentioned you and I lose a gram of skin, a few billion cells which are complete genetic copies of ourselves. We do not invest these cells human rights and treat them as we would treat an identical twin.
That’s correct. Unlike zygotes, these cells are not organisms. We can demonstrate this easily by, say, implanting them or otherwise giving them nutrients; they do not behave in the same way.
Thus, while human, these cells are not living organisms.
The same is true about cancer cells.
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Luke Herche:
After reading your post, though, I think you missed his point. The point of the song is precisely against the kind of cultural perfectionism that you mention.
While searching for the lyrics online, I also came upon this quote from Propaganda (at http://www.joethorn.net/2012/09/25/precious-puritans-pt-2/):
“The song was really designed to be a bait and switch. The indictment on the puritans is really a secondary point. They were not perfect in living out their theology. They had issues just like all of us. And I’m just as much guilty as them. The real point is the last line, “God uses crooked sticks to make straight lines.” God uses us despite our depravity. That’s the main point…I’m guilty too!”
RS: If that “song” is a bait and switch, I took the bait and missed the switch too. Thanks for bringing this up.
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@Zrim
The claim was that the bible directly spoke to this. Using the 6th commandment is begging the question.
____
@Jeff
The same is true about cancer cells.
Actually the same is not true of a tumor. Many forms of cancer, i.e. many cancer cells are similar to a bacteria structurally but human genes. They are a complete organism. A tumor is alive in every sense a bacterial colony is alive. While having a human DNA.
That’s why they are a counter example to your theory. They meet both parts of the definition you had proposed while being something you do not want to consider human.
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In that case, CDH, the counter-point is that the Bible does not directly answer the scientific question of when human life begins (the language about breath is poetic, not scientific). But it does directly answer the moral question as to how to treat human life.
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CD-Host seems to be a strange breed of Aristotelean natural philosopher mixed with a typically brainwashed scientist’s rationalism. First year students in the history of science would find it amusing.
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Hey, my head is spinning and Richard isn’t even posting on this thread! Just kidding, Richard.
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CD-Host,
I beg to differ. No-one has ever successfully taken a cancer cell and developed it into a zygote. The cancer cell’s properties are not the properties of an organism.
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I beg to differ. No-one has ever successfully taken a cancer cell and developed it into a zygote. The cancer cell’s properties are not the properties of an organism.
How is that relevant? No adult human had ever developed them into a zygote either. As for the second part what properties of a bacteria do most tumors lack?
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CD,
The relevance is that a human organism has well-established properties that are the subject of the science of human development. The zygote is one stage in the process of human development, and possesses the properties of a human being in that stage of development.
Cancer cells lack these properties; notably, cancer cells cannot differentiate and cannot self-regulate.
As for the second part what properties of a bacteria do most tumors lack?
Let’s start with a sanity check: why are cancers not classified biologically as a bacterial infection?
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john sizer: Hey, my head is spinning and Richard isn’t even posting on this thread! Just kidding, Richard.
RS: Hey, don’t blame me with your dizziness. I had already posted on this thread when you posted. I think I also posted early on. But no, I have not got involved. By the way, if you go under the water far enough it helps with dizziness. If it was good enough for Naaman…
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Luke, thanks for the clarification. In some ways it’s a good point that Propaganda makes. But it implies a kind of relativism, as if all Christians are equal as is their theology. Again, I’m not a fan of the Puritans. But I’d bet their theology is better than Propaganda’s.
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Let’s start with a sanity check: why are cancers not classified biologically as a bacterial infection?
There are structural differences between human cancers cells and bacteria cells. But they do act quite similarly, in particular they are organisms. Carcinogenesis is classified as a form of speciation that is a cancer is a new parasitic organisms that evolves from humans. Biologists for a century have thought of cancers lifeforms evolving from rearranging their DNA and using this DNA to allow them to form a successful parasidic relationship with the host. Cancers are a species with human DNA. In addition many carcinogenic bacteria evolved from infectious bacteria that came in contact with, and swapped DNA with cancer cells.
The reason people don’t normally talk in this way is that the definition you proposed: human DNA and organism is not sufficient to define human.
(link to summary article: http://www.landesbioscience.com/journals/cc/DuesbergCC10-13.pdf )
As far as differentiation they most certainly do differentiate. That’s how some cancers pass from one part of the body to others. A bone cancer whose ancestors were a skin cancer will have differentiated to attach itself to human bone not human skin.
As for the science of human development I’ve mentioned above the only reasons a newly fertilized human embryo evolves into a human and not a chicken is human DNA. We certainly have seen that changing the DNA changes the development of the zygote, for example how researchers in Spain clones a pyrenean ibex using a goat.
Also in the direction defining human as human DNA + organism means that people with Downs aren’t human. So again this definition runs far too counter to intuition.
As for the zygote as a stage of human development. That doesn’t make it a human. The germ cells that undergo meiosis to become sperms or eggs are a crucial step in human development, that doesn’t make every germ cell a human either. And the reason is that because in context the biological definition of species is exclusive to organisms that can reproduce. The species definition assumes a pre-existing notion of population. For 200 years it has been well know that the system breaks down badly for the young. Now, it breaks down much less so with mammals than other species, but you are going back so far that you end up arguing in a circle, that a zygote is a member of the human population even though humans are unaware of its existence.
The DNA definition will force you into unfixable problems or a long ad-hoc definition which is going to seem forced. Let’s assume you eventually get there to some lengthy ad-hoc definition X that includes people with downs and zygotes but excludes cancer. X is going very arbitrary. There is no good reason to give DNA this prominent a role. But since you are Christian, I find this focus on DNA particularly odd, for the reason I mentioned above. In our discussion of epistemology you said bible takes precedence over reason and logic. Here is a pretty clear cut case where the bible has a crystal clear teaching that respiration is an essential property of being alive. This might be one of the most reinforced teachings. And you are comfortable with a definition species / DNA definition that contradicts the bible. For example Psalm 135the very thing the scriptures teach disqualify idols from being gods is that they lack life and the properties of life are listed out: mouths that speak, eyes that see, and mouths which breathe. In Genesis 2 Adam is simply a dirt statue until God allows him to breathe. And on and on and on.
During the epistemology discussion you did claim how the bible has to take precedence. You can take Zrim’s position that the bible doesn’t have epistemological content only moral and metaphysical content, and that’s fine. But that wasn’t your position in that debate. You could take the position that the bible is so highly non perspicuous that a teaching repeated, let’s ballpark it at 200 times, isn’t meant to be taken seriously while other teachings never stated explicitly and at best barely eluded to like the trinity are critical. But both of those positions contradict the bible as a final authority on anything epistemology.
I’ve presented a position which is: consistent with the bible, consistent with church tradition, consistent with our intuitive notions of morality i.e. consistent with natural law, consistent with biology rightly applied, would be supportable by a large segment of the population and thus could act as a common morality, and is possible to legally enforce. That’s a pretty strong affirmative case.
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D. G. Hart: Again, I’m not a fan of the Puritans. But I’d bet their theology is better than Propaganda’s.
RS: What one says about classical music does not judge the music it judges them. What one says about the Puritans…
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CD-Host: Also in the direction defining human as human DNA + organism means that people with Downs aren’t human.
Not at all. Recall the “genetic distance” concept. The distance between a Downs person and baseline human is practically 0.
CD-Host: Biologists for a century have thought of cancers lifeforms evolving from rearranging their DNA and using this DNA to allow them to form a successful parasidic relationship with the host. Cancers are a species with human DNA.
“For a century”? You cited an article from 2011 that argues that speciation is the correct theory, displacing the mutation theory. Speciation is cited by others as a novel theory that was hinted at in the past but is hardly established science.
But let’s play along. You asked originally how embryos are different from cancer cells. The speciation theory provides a ready answer: They are a different species, karyotypically distinct from human organisms.
Speciation, if true, weakens your case against the humanity of the embryo.
CD-Host: Here is a pretty clear cut case where the bible has a crystal clear teaching that respiration is an essential property of being alive.
I hadn’t noticed this crystal clear teaching before. I’m guessing that the Bible also clearly teaches that the world has four corners and a solid dome above the sky?
Are we discussing in good faith here? I did notice that you pointedly avoided questions about your aims over at GreenBaggins.
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“For a century”? You cited an article from 2011
Yes I did. It was a good summary. The article itself comments on the history and the first proposal of cancer as a species evolved from humans was 1914.
. You asked originally how embryos are different from cancer cells
No I didn’t. I asked how what cancer cells were different from bacteria, or actually what bacterial behaviors cancers don’t exhibit. Again the point was that under your definition any organism with human DNA a tumor is human. I don’t have any problem saying that embryos and cancers exhibit different behaviors and have different structures and hence aren’t the same things at all. But I’m not the one proposing the DNA + organism definition.
Are we discussing in good faith here? I did notice that you pointedly avoided questions about your aims over at GreenBaggins.
On GreenBaggins I answered Ted’s question twice that I had joined that conversation to discuss history of the papacy. From the 3rd time on, I did ignore the question.
In terms of the discussion you and I had, you never asked. The answer is: I was curious how the presuppositional apologetic would play out; so I guess my intention on your discussion with me was curiosity. I’d read the presuppositional arguments, they seemed to have obvious holes. I tried to have this debate with weaker opponents but I hadn’t tested my theory with someone who understood presuppositionalism well, and you did.
As far as abortion, I wasn’t the one who initiated the broader prochoice/pro-life; so if it isn’t in good faith talk to John who asked the question. 🙂 What I had initiated was discussing the fact that politically the pro-life movement achieved tremendous success in 2011 and 2012; but pro-lifers were completely dissatisfied with what political victory actually looked like. Which gets to, in my mind the much more serious question of what the pro-life movement in practice can hope to achieve in the political realm. 2011/2012 are huge victory years, I’d say the biggest victory since 1976 with the Hyde Amendment. But in the face of this sort of huge gains, over 2000 pieces of proposed legislation (estimate) at the state level with over 200 passing that have de-facto they aren’t happy.
The fact that the modern Christian pro-life position is traducianism is an argument I learned from Nancy Pelosi in 2008 and it has impressed me. This one I have tested and I’m pretty firmly convinced she was right.
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Thanks Richard! (for your sense of humor)
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CD,
Well, I apologize for being suspicious.
Here’s why I hit the species idea pretty hard.
First, it is the natural category that biologists think in terms of. As we agree, biologists are not at all confused between cancers and embryos. And the reason is that a biologist says that an embryo is a species Homo sapiens in a particular stage of development, while a cancer is an aberrant mutation (or, now, possibly a new species) that is not an organism in a particular stage of development.
Second, law has already developed around preservation of species. When the EPA designates a species as protected, that designation encompasses the species at all stages of development. Bald Eagle eggs are just as protected as chicks, juveniles, and adults.
Third, from a purely personal point of view, species is the category I think in. When I find a Monarch egg on milkweed, I think Danaus plexippus and bring it in. I don’t dither about whether the egg has more characteristics in common with stinkbug eggs than adult butterflies. Species is the driving thought.
And so it is here.
You may not agree to the moral category, and I won’t try to persuade you. But the biology is not equivocal: embryos are human beings at a particular stage of development. Cancers are not; skin cells are not; bacteria are not. Biologists find it easy to distinguish these, and I don’t see the value in trying to undermine their categories.
I mean, if we want to go the “lumper” route, then why not argue that since every physical thing is made of protons, neutrons, and electrons, then nothing has any more value than anything else?
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@Jeff —
OK taking stock a bit more. I don’t think what’s important about humans is human DNA but rather human behaviors. So for example at the other extreme I have no problem considering someone who is brain dead as effectively dead, because they are no longer capable of engaging in human behaviors. On the other hand I think some level of protection should be extended to prevent killing more intelligent life like dolphins or apes. That is, what’s worth preserving is not technical humans but actual people. And actual people are people because of their traits. The idea that flushing a petri dish with extra fertilized eggs is morally equivalent to the Virginia Tech massacre strikes me as morally absurd. And not only that I think it strikes most pro-lifers as absurd the second they are asked think about this question in some way other than through the prism of being anti-abortion. Which is why I like the late sex example because that an example where we are probably talking in the range of 10m US abortions a year, yet they are completely unconcerned, proving this isn’t really about preserving embryos.
Now I do happen to also genuinely think that species as a biological category is vague and breaks down badly once you move away from fertile adults. So we are disagreeing on the biology. I could give lots of examples of species where the simple “early stage of development” model you are proposing falls apart. To extend species to non-breeding members of a population requires a preexisting notion of “population” which ends up turning the whole argument about using species to define human into a big circle. I agree we often think in terms of species because generally we are asking easy questions, and species works well for answering easy questions.
I don’t think abortion policy is an easy question. I think the pro-life movement has tried to take a very complex question about how to draft a reproductive policy that maximizes the benefit to society and has attempted to oversimplify into a question about whether it is possible to construct definitions such that a fertilized egg, or a clump non differentiated cells or a typical mammalian embryo can be called human. Which mostly misses the point, but seems to be convincing to large numbers of people.
For me using ;anguage like “a mother killing her child” is ridiculous. I have a child. Even at three months, long before she could crawl she could see how to use objects in combination to get stuff she was interested in: planning, visualization, use of tools those are human behaviors. A human zygote isn’t any different than a rat zygote behaviorally and won’t have any meaningful differences for months. I don’t think people are wrong when they have totally different attitudes about the mother who drowns her toddler and the women who keeps herself 10lbs too thin while trying to get pregnant, even though the too thin women is likely under this pro-life definition killing a couple children a year.
If you want to step back the real issue isn’t whether such a definition exist. As I posited before I think if we went through 25 rounds you could end up putting enough qualifiers on a definition to get where you want to be. The real issue is why use a definition that leads to policy so grossly counter intuitive when definitions that are fully in accord with our intuition are available and don’t require nearly as artifice?
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CD-Host: The real issue is why use a definition that leads to policy so grossly counter intuitive when definitions that are fully in accord with our intuition are available and don’t require nearly as artifice?
Three reasons, and then I’ll leave off because we’re getting back into the moral question.
(1) My intuitions are really, I promise, not the same as yours. When I read your account of what it means to be human, it strikes me as an intelligent man defining humanity in terms of intelligence. I’ve been down that road (Peter Singer, e.g.), and I find it to be a complete dead end.
(2) But even if my intuitions were the same as yours, still and all, mankind has a terrible track record with using intuition to define who gets human rights and who doesn’t.
My math students (most of them) have to have their intuitions trained before they are any good at being intuitive. Things that “look about right” turn out to be dead wrong.
How do you know about yourself that you didn’t start with the premise that “abortion should be acceptable” and move the goalposts to fit that premise? Not saying you did, necessarily — but if intuition is the major guide here, then how do you know?
(3) Accordingly, I’m with Zrim: Scripture, or our moral sense, can tell us what is right and wrong to do to a human being. But biology defines what it means to be a “human being.”
And despite your worries (which are not unfounded — the problems are real), the current state of biology is definitely in favor of keeping “species” as the major distinction. And the shift in the area I know best — butterflies — has been towards giving priority to genetics over against morphology to determine species, genus, and family relationships.
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My math students (most of them) have to have their intuitions trained before they are any good at being intuitive. Things that “look about right” turn out to be dead wrong.
I understand what you are saying and I agree an important part of mathematical training is developing a more refined intuition. But ultimately the reason the counter examples are effective is because the person walks away believing:
a) I have the right definition
b) I use to have the wrong understanding of that definition
A counter example which went totally contrary to intuition rather leads one to still believe they misunderstood the question but now to believe they had the wrong definition.
Since you used math I’ll use math examples. The Weierstrass function doesn’t make one question their definition of continuity or differentiability it rather makes them understand that continuity is really a genuinely weaker condition than differentiability.
Conversely something like learning about the existence of prime ideals that don’t have a single generator, leads one to believe that the definition of prime in terms of numbers is just oversimplified and wrong. Their intuition completely shifts from a focus on numbers to a focus on ideals.
How do you know about yourself that you didn’t start with the premise that “abortion should be acceptable” and move the goalposts to fit that premise? Not saying you did, necessarily — but if intuition is the major guide here, then how do you know?
Well the short answer is I never considered the “embryos are human” argument terribly morally troubling. There is no way being an American you can avoid thinking about abortion
I had always considered the issue to be one of quality of life not quantity of life. For example I support assisted suicide even though I consider the chronically ill meaningfully human. Now if you are asking did I construct my beliefs about ensoulment in terms of my pro-choice position. I did that consciously. It is impossible to believe:
a) Zygotes / embryos are humans
b) Killing humans is always intrinsically wrong
c) Abortion is vital to society
One of those 3 has to go. Prior to rejecting (a) I rejected (b) and abortion was evidence for it. I’m able to hold a position much closer to (b) only because I was able to accept (a), and no question that was a conscious choice. I’ve been raised in a society that casually engages in war, has insane perverse medical polices which result in millions in deaths and I’m part of a species whose breeding mechanism has a low success rate. I’ve also been raised in a society with late marriage and bad supports for women who become pregnant. Far too many people I love and cherish would have had their lives derailed without abortion. Far too many couples who really didn’t like each other very much would have ended up having to raise children together, at a time in their lives when they weren’t ready. While as an evangelical I had trouble with (c), I kept coming back to the lack of any viable alternative in the society I actually live in.
So ultimately if (b) or (c) had to go at least partially overboard it was going to be (b). Finding a way to contradict (a) is a bit of a relief. But yes, no question I built by definition of human to support my pro-choice position, as I mentioned it was Nancy Pelosi, in a speech about abortion who first introduced me to this theory.
That being said, the issue of the definition of human seems much more important for most people since they think in terms of moral absolutes rather than cost / benefit.
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CD – It will be interesting to see how God evaluates your intricate logic on judgment day.
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Nancy Pelosi, that courageous defender of San Francisco values. Where would the Western World be without her…
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CD – If you’re not a Christian (or even a theist?) why are you “shoulding” all over everyone? Why do you care? It always amazes me how so many atheists are “full of should” and how they have no qualms about 21st century political Liberalism. My question is, why does an atheist care deeply about anything? It makes no sense to me. How is anything “right” or “wrong” in an atheistic worldview? When it come to “values” it’s all just opinions and mine are as good as yours.
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“Far too many people I love and cherish would have had their lives derailed without abortion. Far too many couples who really didn’t like each other very much would have ended up having to raise children together, at a time in their lives when they weren’t ready.”
There’s a concept you need to become familiar with called “adoption”. There are also some methods that mature people use known as “birth control” that don’t involve killing the child after it has been conceived. For a logical person it seems like you are being governed more by emotion than reason in these statements.
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CD: The Weierstrass function doesn’t make one question their definition of continuity or differentiability it rather makes them understand that continuity is really a genuinely weaker condition than differentiability.
This is a good example. Historically, the Weierstrass function was created specifically to demonstrate that functions can be continuous everywhere and differentiable nowhere (there’s a fun discussion of this in Dr’s Euler’s Fabulous Formula, IIRC), putting to rest a speculation that had persisted for a while.
CD: Conversely something like learning about the existence of prime ideals that don’t have a single generator, leads one to believe that the definition of prime in terms of numbers is just oversimplified and wrong. Their intuition completely shifts from a focus on numbers to a focus on ideals.
This example is not so good. The extension of prime numbers to prime ideals does not make the definition of primes “wrong” or “oversimplified.” Math, unlike science, does not generally have a creative destruction process in which older ideas are shown to be wrong — except in the rare instance where an idea is genuinely wrong!
So in the case of prime numbers, it continues to be true and useful that integers have a unique factorization in primes. This fact underlies all manner of good math, including the math that keeps your online banking transactions secure. Hence, most number theory books spend a fair amount of ink building up to the Prime Factorization Theorem (or Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic).
Now, it is also true and useful that we can extend the notion of prime numbers to prime ideals, which may or may not have unique generators. Thus, we can broaden our horizons a bit without discarding number theory.
This may or may not impinge on your definition of “human being”, but it bore mentioning.
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CD would have made a good Nazi, theorizing about the subhumanity of the Jews. I’m going off on him (I assume) but this is probably the most pitiful display I have witnessed on Old Life.
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A reposnse to CD’s eminent theologian, Nancy Pelosi, from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops:
Bishops Respond to House Speaker Pelosi’s Misrepresentation of Church Teaching Against Abortion
WASHINGTON–Cardinal Justin F. Rigali, chairman of the U.S. Bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities, and Bishop William E. Lori, chairman of the U.S. Bishops’ Committee on Doctrine, have issued the following statement:
In the course of a “Meet the Press” interview on abortion and other public issues on August 24, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi misrepresented the history and nature of the authentic teaching of the Catholic Church against abortion.
In fact, the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, “Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable. Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law.” (No. 2271)
In the Middle Ages, uninformed and inadequate theories about embryology led some theologians to speculate that specifically human life capable of receiving an immortal soul may not exist until a few weeks into pregnancy. While in canon law these theories led to a distinction in penalties between very early and later abortions, the Church’s moral teaching never justified or permitted abortion at any stage of development.
These mistaken biological theories became obsolete over 150 years ago when scientists discovered that a new human individual comes into being from the union of sperm and egg at fertilization. In keeping with this modern understanding, the Church teaches that from the time of conception (fertilization), each member of the human species must be given the full respect due to a human person, beginning with respect for the fundamental right to life.
More information on the Church’s teaching on this issue can be found in our brochure “The Catholic Church is a Pro-Life Church”.
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CD: So, this is a personal question, and I won’t take it amiss if you pass.
Did your change in stance on abortion coincide with or affect your loss of faith, or was it unrelated?
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Erik Charter
Posted October 13, 2012 at 1:36 pm | Permalink
CD – It will be interesting to see how God evaluates your intricate logic on judgment day.
CD,
I’ve seen reformed guys keep their cool when charismatic/Pentecostal types accused them of turning God into a sadistic demon. I’ve seen reformed guys keep their cool when liberal Christians accuse them of racism for defending the theology of slave holders. I’ve seen reformed guys keep their cool when evangelicals accuse them of self-righteous nihilism for their political stances.
But you CD, you’ve been able to get some of these stoic-Protestants to turn into sanctimonious evangelicals.
I’m impressed.
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Hi Jeff
So I guess our remaining issue is prime ideals 🙂 OK now you are hitting old rusty areas of my brain.
So in the case of prime numbers, it continues to be true and useful that integers have a unique factorization in primes. This fact underlies all manner of good math, including the math that keeps your online banking transactions secure.
Exactly because the standard integers are a unique factorization domain
Saying 30 = 2*3*5 is the same as saying
the ideal generated by 30 is the product of the ideals generated by 2, 3 and 5. That fact that is unique is unrelated to the fact that such a factorization exists. And further since
30 = (-2) * 3 * (-5) you can see the ideal notion, even in this degenerate case is still needed, What’s important about understanding the UFD’s are an exception is that prime ideas are not necessarily maximal ideals. And without that understanding, no bank account would not be secure at all
So yes, I did mean what I said. Once people came to consider primes in something like (assuming from your other comments you know TeX notation):
mathbb{Z}[sqrt{-5}], the naive understanding of primes that came from just thinking about the integers collapsed. They had the wrong definition of prime.
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Erik —
Wow lots of comments
CD – It will be interesting to see how God evaluates your intricate logic on judgment day.
You aren’t getting squishy Arminian on me are you? I lost at bingo before the creation of the world. My pre-creation bingo skill is what matters not things like my opinions or actions.
y question is, why does an atheist care deeply about anything? It makes no sense to me. How is anything “right” or “wrong” in an atheistic worldview? When it come to “values” it’s all just opinions and mine are as good as yours
Atheism does not imply nihilism. Atheists can believe in something that plays a similar role to absolute morality and in fact I do happen to believe that. Which is to say Christian morality basically argues that the nature of humanity is such that there are a systems of behaviors such that human life is improved and the world is made into a more just and joyous place. Atheists by and large don’t disagree with that assessment. They might, and often do disagree with the specific system of behaviors and they most certainly disagree on how one knows the contents of the system but they do not (in general) disagree with its existence.
The idea that atheists are moral relativists or moral nihilists is a Christian myth.
___
There’s a concept you need to become familiar with called “adoption”.
I’ve never been a woman giving birth. From what I understand from women adoption is quite emotionally stressful and upsetting. Moreover, pregnancy is dangerous and damaging to women’s health. I don’t feel comfortable jailing women for decades who refuse to undergo emotional and physical damage without a very compelling state interest.
There are also some methods that mature people use known as “birth control” that don’t involve killing the child after it has been conceived.
Yes and the abortion levels have been dropping dramatically as birth control is getting better (i.e. less chance of pregnancy) and more reliable methods are being used. In countries where the state actively assists women in getting contraception the abortion rate per 1000 women is about 2/3rds lower than ours. I agree 100% with contraception as an alternative to abortion as do most liberals. It is conservatives who have blocked the USA from having a European contraception policy and thus drastically lowering the number of abortions.
A reposnse to CD’s eminent theologian, Nancy Pelosi, from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops:
Which is a terrible response. Nancy Pelosi put together a (to my mind) well argued case that the hierarchy had erred on a matter of faith and morals and was teaching the heresy of traducianism as doctrine. There response was to ignore the theological issue and instead assert that the church had consistently been opposed to abortion. Which is both irrelevant to her argument, and misleading. Irrelevant because it is entirely possible that the church could be in error on this theological point while a prohibition on abortion was the constant teaching. Misleading because the definition of abortion vs. restoration of menses is part of the issue.
So yes I’m well aware of that comment. It frankly is such a shoddy argument they ought to be embarrassed. If the Speaker of the United House Representatives makes a theological argument in a semi-official capacity on which government policy for 300m people depends; and that argument goes on to be heavily cited it deserves a better response than “because I said so”.
That press release was an embarrassing moment for the hierarchy.
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CD – “Atheism does not imply nihilism” – Why not? What does it imply?
“Atheists can believe in something that plays a similar role to absolute morality”- Such as what? What is the source of this “belief”?
“and in fact I do happen to believe that” – What? Why?
“Which is to say Christian morality basically argues that the nature of humanity is such that there are a systems of behaviors such that human life is improved and the world is made into a more just and joyous place.” – This sentence makes no sense to me.
“They might, and often do disagree with the specific system of behaviors and they most certainly disagree on how one knows the contents of the system but they do not (in general) disagree with its existence.” – Likewise this sentence makes no sense to me.
“The idea that atheists are moral relativists or moral nihilists is a Christian myth.” – Prove it. If I want to follow Ayn Rand or behave like the Marquis De Sade why is it wrong using an atheistic worldview?
And if you’re an atheist, why do you feel the need to even justify your reason for favoring abortion rights to us Christians? Why not just say there is no God, a woman has a right to control her own body, the baby is an inconvenience to her, medical science makes abortion possible, the woman can have an abortion and no one can stop her, deal with it. What is all this B.S. about cancer cells and math. Have some guts and be a bold atheist.
Wanting to hold onto morality is where atheism always breaks down. Listen to Gordon Stein’s debate with Greg Bahnsen sometime and hear his explanation of why what Hitler did was wrong. It’s one of the weakest, most pitiful arguments I have ever heard in my life.
“Atheists by and large don’t disagree with that assessment.” What assessment?
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As Christians we have an interest in defining when life begins because we fear a God who has given us commandments not to commit murder. It is clear from Scripture that life begins at conception. Nancy Pelosi can take her “years of study” and stick it where the sun don’t shine. Why do I want an atheist’s opinion on when life begins? An atheist, by their own confession, is, to quote Scripture, a mist that is here for a little while and then vanishes. They, and their opinions, will begin the process of rotting until they cease to exist in a relatively short period of time. I made this point to a local atheist and she said she was good with that because she might be able to become a part of a tree. It was actually a pretty honest opinion and I didn’t harrass her for it. An atheist who takes that view AND doesn’t try to tell me about morality is one I can respect.
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OK Erik let me start with Euthyphro’s dilemma. Do you believe that some actions are right and others wrong because God commands them; or do you believe that God command them because they are in some sense intrinsically wrong. In other words if I have two divine beings A and B, and don’t know which is God and which is Satan do I have an intrinsic way of telling them apart?
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CD,
Things are right or wrong because God deigned them so. That we make distinction is in accord with an innate created heirarchy(conscience). God’s perfection assures us that these judgement are not arbitrary or capricious. There is no worship of a God who is less than God or a God who is conformed to an ‘other’ standard that either pre-exists or to which God Himself conforms. Having said that, we don’t believe in a God who is so free as to be less or other than God. We reject a God who either conforms to an foreign or other universal standard/truth or is free to be less than perfect in His moral attributes.
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Sean —
Thank you for attempting to answer. Let me repeat this back to you.
— All people have an innate created heirarchy(conscience). Morality is derivable and in accord with that.
That is to say God’s command are “good” in the sense they are in accord with our conscience, what I was calling our intuition about the good. Is that correct?
___
Reading the rest of your post, I’m unsure what it would mean for God to be less than perfect in his moral attributes? Assume there were an alternative universe with a God like ours that had an imperfect morality, created a conscience for something that played the same role as humans? What would be different?
______
Erik —
Do you agree with what Sean is saying here?
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CD: –That is to say God’s command are “good” in the sense they are in accord with our conscience, what I was calling our intuition about the good. Is that correct?”
Sean: This is incorrect. Man’s conscience is not the arbiter of God’s righteousness. Rather man’s conscience is in accord with the righteousness of God. Again Christianity does not posit a God who is less than the perfection of His moral attributes. In addition, within biblical theism, their is a ‘fall’ of man from his original or created righteousness, such that in the same creature you see both excellence of virtue and failure of moral courage. Christianity does not anticipate either a rival God or a God who is free to be less than or other than the perfection of his goodness.
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Sean —
You are losing me with this last response.
This is incorrect. Man’s conscience is not the arbiter of God’s righteousness. Rather man’s conscience is in accord with the righteousness of God.
I know this arbiter thing is a touchy area and I’m sorry about that, but what is the difference? If two things are in accord they agree. In other words assume I have two functions:
c is man’s conscience (a perfect conscience, say for example I average between all men).
r is God’s righteousness.
I take a list of acts: a1, a2, a3…. and I compute c(a1), c(a2)… = good, bad, bad, good….
I also compute r(a1), r(a2)…. = good, bad, bad, good…
Do those two lists agree? If they don’t agree where don’t they agree and why not?
___
Christianity does not anticipate either a rival God or a God who is free to be less than or other than the perfection of his goodness.
I understand that. But you are asserting that God has this property called, “perfection in his moral attributes”. What I’m trying to figure out, is beyond a slogan what does it mean? How can I tell the difference between a God with perfect moral attributes and one with imperfect moral attributes.
Say for example I asserted, “God is blue”. And Erik disagreed and said, “God is pink”. Now if we could look at God, and we saw blue I’d be right, if we looked at God and he were pink Erik would be right. If we can’t look at God at all, directly or indirectly, he is neither pink nor blue. That is if I can’t tell the difference between a pink God and a blue God the statement that he’s blue doesn’t mean anything.
_____
The reason I’m pushing on this is that it is my assertion that once we drop statements that are intrinsically unknowable, the remaining statements about Christian morality end up being the same kinds of statements atheists agree to. Or to be a bit more precise that normative ethics aren’t dependent on religion. Paul, Romans 1:19 that morality is known to all people intrinsically.
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CD – I asked you about 8 questions on your statements about atheist morality so I’m not too interested in playing any of your games until you can answer those. I need to be able to take your worldview seriously before I take your questions seriously.
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You really need to listen to the Bahnsen/Stein debate if you haven’t already. Like Bahnsen I affirm that the proof of the Christian God is the impossibility of the contrary. How do you as an atheist account for laws of nature, laws of logic, and especially laws of morality without Him? Without the first two, science, on which most atheists rely heavily, would be impossible.
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Erik —
On the moral question, engage in good faith or feel free to ignore. This was your topic. But I don’t work for you. I’ll answer the questions the way I want.
____
How do you as an atheist account for laws of nature,
I have sense experiences
those sense experiences appear highly predictable
I can conduct numerous experiments to test those theories about the world
laws of logic,
A logic is a system for manipulating statements.
There exists a logic that appears to generate true (i.e. non falsified) statements when I push other non falsified statements into it.
laws of morality
there exists behaviors which advance my enlightened self interest
those behaviors are predictable using abstract statement
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CD – How does “advancing your enlightened self interest” have anything to do with your prior statement:
“Christian morality basically argues that the nature of humanity is such that there are a systems of behaviors such that human life is improved and the world is made into a more just and joyous place. Atheists by and large don’t disagree with that assessment. They might, and often do disagree with the specific system of behaviors and they most certainly disagree on how one knows the contents of the system but they do not (in general) disagree with its existence.
The idea that atheists are moral relativists or moral nihilists is a Christian myth.”
Your self-interest as the definition of morality sounds awfully morally relativistic to me.
What does your self-interest have to do with making the world a more just and joyous place? This sounds like a moral version of trickle-down economics.
What makes your self-interest any more “enlightened” than the next person? What if it’s in your self-interest to have a bunch of money and it’s in my self-interest to take it from you?
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I would argue that like most former Christians you are still running on the fumes of Christianity in your new worldview. You need to embrace where you and everyone else is at if there is no God. Life is nasty, brutish, and short and there is no such thing as right and wrong. You can think there are laws of nature and laws of logic to somehow derive comfort, but without the providence of a loving God your life could be coming to a gruesome, terrible end today and there would be no reason for it. S**t happens, as they say.
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CD:
I confess a God whom I can not know in any sensory way. I necessarily believe in that which is invisible. Now, we can have long discussions on what we can trust and know as matter of historical record and it’s reliability and for me that has to ultimately center on the historicity of Jesus Christ and His claims and historical attestation of deity(maybe He was crazy). Paul attributes intrinsic morality to the imprimatur of the Imago Dei. So, while you find recourse within yourself for moral conscience, Paul attributes that capacity to being derivative of an moral ultimate first cause, namely the God of scripture who has further revealed himself in His incarnate son. But, if historical claims are inadequate to your ‘truth’ protocol, while you can have long discussions as to your grounding in only empirical sensory data , which is an over-realized statement and is inherently inadequate to the exhaustive explaining of anyone’s behavior or existence, yours or mine, apart from the viability of historical truth claims, which though attested to by reliable eyewitness testimony(historically considered), fall short of producing a current, modern, in the flesh God-man. Christianity will not seek to accomodate your ‘Truth’ project.
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Erik —
Your constant assertions about what atheists need to believe are ridiculous. I keep trying to get atheist morals off the ground by explaining to you the basic and you keep screaming that real atheists should be immoral. If you want to stick your fingers in your ears and scream la-la-la-la-la then there is nothing I can say. In the real world there are no fumes of Christianity. Atheist moral philosophy exists and has existed for millennia. Being told to do stuff by your invisible friend is not the only basis for anything.
There are entire works about construction of meaning and morality by atheists. Humans are one of the few species capable of organizing societies of unrelated members which engage in complex webs of interdependency. Atheists live in those societies as much as theists. Atheists benefit from those societies as much as theists. One doesn’t have to believe in God to not want to undermine the social structures necessary for humans to live and thrive. Moreover, those cultures that have had the most influence on other cultures are precisely the cultures that facilitate the construction of complex societies. 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.
The problem with psychopathic moralities that you keep proposing is that they fail obvious game theory tests. To pick your last example, if everyone is engaging in theft, then individuals with any property have to constantly fight one another. This make additional property accumulation almost impossible. When this psychopathic culture comes in contact with a culture with higher levels of cooperation the individuals in it will draw it into conflict with the high cooperation culture. War is a high cooperation activity so the psychopathic society will lose. A gene that quickly kills an individual is a defective gene. A moral structure that quickly kills a culture is a defective moral structure. There is no need for a god to assert things that basic.
Atheists are not psychopaths. It is not a failure of atheism that it denies this psychopathic morality you keep trying to assert is its only natural state. Sextus Empiricus, for whom empiricism is named thought hard about how to put morality on a firm foundation which was universal, i.e. based on reason. He lists 5:
a) rules of conduct (choice of a way of life or of a particular actions adopted by one person or many),
b) habits (joint adoption of a certain kind of action by a number of men, the transgressor of which is not actually punished)
c) laws (written contracts among members of a state, the transgressor of which is punished)
d) legendary beliefs (acceptance of unhistorical and fictitious events, such as the legends about Cronos)
e) dogmatic conceptions (acceptance of a fact which seems to be established by analogy or some form of demonstration)
You’ll notice that legendary beliefs is only one of the 5 areas and atheism only address itself to a few particular types of legendary beliefs.
For a more recent example In 2008 Jonathan Haidt, an atheist, published a book on moral foundations theory. Which was an attempt to determine what sort of moral mechanisms might exist in humans, where morality is a mechanisms for allowing cooperative structures. It appears there are 6 sort of core moral ideas that are cross cultural and possessed by all individuals: care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. Individuals in a culture possess weighings of these 6 variables and a cultural understanding of how to apply them to specific acts.
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CD-Host:
Q: How do you as an atheist account for laws of nature,
I have sense experiences
those sense experiences appear highly predictable
I can conduct numerous experiments to test those theories about the world
RS: But how do you know that your sense experiences have evolved in such a way that they are reliable? How do you know that what appears to be predictable is something that gains truth whatever truth is in your view of the world? So you can conduct experiments, but that really proves nothing, Your “enlightened self-interest” may simply be adjusting all the experiments and data to conform to what you want. Your being utterly dependent on your sense experiences means that you are your own standard of truth and you are operating as your own god.
Q: laws of logic,
CD-Host: A logic is a system for manipulating statements.
There exists a logic that appears to generate true (i.e. non falsified) statements when I push other non falsified statements into it.
RS: So logic is simply a method for manipulating statements, which might tell you something about how you conduct experiments according to your senses. If logic does not stand above your sense experiences, then logic is simply a way for you to manipulate data and statements to conform them to your self-interests and self-love. Once again, you are left in control of the situation. Interesting how that works out. But that also leaves you in a bit of a bind when it comes to trying to determine what a non-falsified statement is or is not. If logic does not help that, then there is no such thing as logic in reality. So now you are really left with sense experiences with no way to determine anything as true or false other than how you feel about them.
Q: laws of morality
CD-Host: there exists behaviors which advance my enlightened self interest
those behaviors are predictable using abstract statement
RS: So the moment I decide to torture and kill you that means you have no way of saying that what I am about to do is wrong. It fits with my enlightened self-interest and so who cares about yours. You live in a nice little system of self that allows you no rational basis for knowledge, truth, knowledge of nature (whatever that may be), or morality. The atheistic view of the world collapses into a pile of rubble when it is seen for what it really is. It is nothing more than everything revolves around you and you end up trying to control the things you want to find the results you want. But in reality, if you follow that nasty little thing called logic you will find that you have utterly no way of determining any truth at all. The planet has simply evolved into what it has and has in a meaningless and mindless way spawned forth people who are meaningless little germs who will die and that will be that. No one has any meaning nor can they do anything that has meaning. Morality has not meaning in this system.
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Richard —
Betty is a good evangelical and has recipe for chicken. She can’t remember if it is supposed to be 400 degrees for 45 minutes or 450 degrees for 45 minutes. She tried the 450 degrees and it is too dry. She then tries the 400 degrees and the chicken tastes good. Is she being her own god in determining how to properly cook chicken, that is she in some sense violating the first commandment? If not why not?
________
What you did in your response was impose a theistic structure. For example the notion that there is a reality beyond sensory experience. “Ultimate truth” is theism. If there is no experiment to tell X from Y then there is no difference between X and Y. That is not to say everyone’s observations are perfect, but imperfection in observation is compensated for by inconsistency of observation.
Experimentation isn’t merely a means of discovering truth, that is the very definition of truth. If I, in a consistent way experience the world as if X were true, X is true.
By arguing for some additional perspective, a higher truth, you are subtly reintroducing theism. That is you are trying to create an observer whose observations, whose frame, is perfect.
: So logic is simply a method for manipulating statements, which might tell you something about how you conduct experiments according to your senses. If logic does not stand above your sense experiences, then logic is simply a way for you to manipulate data and statements to conform them to your self-interests and self-love.
Correct, mostly. But be careful here. It is in my self-interest to have my logical system be consistent with experimental results. I don’t have any interests beyond that. Your phrasing, “self love” seems to imply some sort of ulterior motive.
If logic does not help that, then there is no such thing as logic in reality.
Again note what you are saying here. That I can construct a logic which allows me to take experimentally true statements, combine and manipulate them to generate only other experimentally true statements and that’s not really a logic. That’s reality there is no reality beyond that.
So the moment I decide to torture and kill you that means you have no way of saying that what I am about to do is wrong.
Of course I do. I don’t have any way of saying it is “ultimately wrong” in some sense that has nothing to do with human experience. But since you and I are both humans I don’t need to. You and I can discuss morality from a vast shared frame.
It is nothing more than everything revolves around you and you end up trying to control the things you want to find the results you want.
Yes that is what life is. DNA is a protein that is something capable of manipulating and controlling its environment. DNA has intent, self replication. All life are machines built by DNA for the purpose of copying DNA.
No one has any meaning nor can they do anything that has meaning.
Nonsense. No one has some sort of ultimate divine meaning. That doesn’t prevent much more limited meanings from existing.
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CD: …the naive understanding of primes that came from just thinking about the integers collapsed. They had the wrong definition of prime.
I really hate to be pedantic, because it would seem that nothing of substance actually rides on this issue.
But I keep having this gut feeling that your method here connects to your method in our other conversations. You seem very eager to declare X “wrong.”
Here, in this sub-conversation, I ask myself, “What proposition is he saying is wrong?”
It’s not like any propositions about prime numbers were proved false. Else, we would have gotten frantic e-mails from college professors and NCTM saying, “Stop teaching your kids the following…” No, the standard theorems about prime numbers continue to be published.
OK, so you seem to be saying that a new, broader definition of “prime” is more useful and has taken over in higher-level math. This is very true (e.g. Childs, Intro to Higher Algebra).
But the new, broader definition is aimed at a different class of objects: instead of Z+, we are going to consider any set of objects that obey the axioms of an ideal.
That doesn’t make the old definition “wrong.”
The key point here is that definitions can’t be wrong. They are more or less useful, but never wrong. They can be self-referentially incoherent, in which case they refer to no object whatsoever (e.g.: The barber who shaves all and only those who do not shave themselves) — but still not wrong.
Likewise, the discovery of Riemannian geometry did not make Euclidean geometry wrong. It simply clarified that Euclid’s 5th postulate is not a consequence of the other four.
Now what’s the prize? My point is to go easy on the “wrong” button.
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CD-Host: OK Erik let me start with Euthyphro’s dilemma. Do you believe that some actions are right and others wrong because God commands them; or do you believe that God command them because they are in some sense intrinsically wrong.
The classic Christian response is to grab both horns unequally. Actions are right because God commands them. And our moral senses affirm the rightness of God’s commands because we are made in His image.
BUT
Our moral senses suffer from a lack of omniscience together with corruption from the Fall.
So, an individual’s moral sense is a fickle guide to morality, and might even disagree with God’s commands at X or Y point.
The grasping of the first horn goes to motive. When I, as a Christian, obey God, I am to do so out of love for Him. Obeying his commands because “it’s just right” in the abstract is no real obedience at all.
Had Adam obeyed, it would not have been because “it is inherently wrong to eat of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil”, but rather because he loved God and wanted to obey His commands because they were His commands.
Which is what the second Adam, Jesus, actually did.
CD: In other words if I have two divine beings A and B, and don’t know which is God and which is Satan do I have an intrinsic way of telling them apart?
Not absolutely reliably. And in fact, in a metaphorical sense, many people have difficulty with this today: Either on the one hand suspecting God’s commands of being wrong, or on the other elevating their own moral senses to a kind of absolute or personally-absolute status.
I would say that your question sets up an argument against Manicheism: If there were two divine beings, then choosing which to obey would be an a-moral choice. But it is clear that this is not so; hence, there are not two divine beings.
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CD-Host: The idea that atheists are moral relativists or moral nihilists is a Christian myth.
Well, OK. At one level, as someone with atheist friends, I can agree: Atheists are capable of having a moral compass and living “as if” the moral compass pointed North.
But then the meta-question comes: By what principle does one set one’s moral compass?
We might ask this question in terms of the Atheistic Euthyphro dilemma: Are actions good because they are universally and inherently good, OR are actions good because people universally declare them to be so?
If the first, then we have to ask how we would know what the good is. If the second, then we have to ask why people have the right to define what is good.
Take your own case. You define good in terms of your own enlightened self-interest. That was a surprise: I was expecting utilitarianism and got Ayn Rand instead. So: How did you land on “enlightened self-interest” instead of Kant, Mill, Singer, Rawls, or Aristotle?
And having done so, what is it that makes your choice the correct one?
This question goes to the charge of moral relativism. If you can argue that enlightened self-interest is the only possible choice, then you are cleared of being a relativist — but at the cost of charging all non-Randians with being unethical. If not, then the charge sticks: You believe that enlightened self-interest is right for you, but some other choice might be right for others.
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JRC: The classic Christian response is to grab both horns unequally. Actions are right because God commands them. And our moral senses affirm the rightness of God’s commands because we are made in His image.
If you are with me so far, then we can refine this statement by asking, “Why does God command what He commands?”
And the answer is that He commands what is good out of His own nature. Why is it right to love Him? Because God is love. Why does God command us to not worship idols? Because He is the Lord God who brought the Israelites out of the land of Egypt.
So coming back to Euthyphro, Good is what God commands; God commands because of His nature, which defines what is Good.
So the proper answer is “both.”
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Hi Jeff, good comments.
I agree with you the ideals thing might be instructive. First off let me clarify something about this example. This was an example about training intuition.
My assertion was that the intuition which sees a simple relationship between prime generators (prime numbers), maximal ideals and unique factorization was wrong. I agree with you the relationship is simple for Z+, but Z is a rather unusual integral ring and this simple relationship exists only because of atypical properties of Z. What I’m proposing happened was there was an intellectual shift which is still passing through the layers, incidentally where people went from thinking of “prime” as a property of a number to thinking of “prime” as a property of an ideal. I do think that 300 years from now elementary age students will be taught prime in terms of ideals and not numbers, I agree this hasn’t happened yet but it will take time to figure out how to pass this deeper understanding through the entire culture. Elementary age are still taught to picture electrons orbiting the nucleus like planets orbit the sun even though we’ve known that analogy is deeply flawed and misleading for a century.
An example were we are further along in this process of altering intuition is Euclid’s Second Book of the Elements where basic algebraic formulas like: (a-b)(a+b) = a^2 – b^2 are proven. Its not that Euclid’s methods were wrong but once we had an algebraic notation those theorems became so obvious that no one teaches the 2nd book as anything other than historical interest. They are passe because what is of value in Euclid’s 2nd book is better expressed on terms of the algebraic notation.
Likewise, the discovery of Riemannian geometry did not make Euclidean geometry wrong. It simply clarified that Euclid’s 5th postulate is not a consequence of the other four.
I think you mean projective geometry (there is more than one parallel through any given point). Riemann geometry (there are 0 parallels) came after. And no it didn’t prove Euclidean geometry wrong, what it did prove wrong was our belief that the axioms of geometry were natural in the sense there could not be an alternative, that they were god given. The definition of logic I used in this thread, would have been impossible without Saccheri.
I’ll be happy to go easy on the wrong button. We were talking though about how intuition is trained.. but we are off that subject.
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CD-Host: Richard – Betty is a good evangelical and has recipe for chicken. She can’t remember if it is supposed to be 400 degrees for 45 minutes or 450 degrees for 45 minutes. She tried the 450 degrees and it is too dry. She then tries the 400 degrees and the chicken tastes good. Is she being her own god in determining how to properly cook chicken, that is she in some sense violating the first commandment? If not why not?
RS: She is being her own god is her ultimate love is herself and not God when she is cooking that chicken. She is being her own god if she thinks that her having the chicken is anything but the mercy of God to her.
CD-Host: What you did in your response was impose a theistic structure.
RS: No, I simply recognized it. Your position is the one that imposes a materialistic structure on all things. I might add that you do that without one shred of empirical evidence.
CD-Host: For example the notion that there is a reality beyond sensory experience. “Ultimate truth” is theism. If there is no experiment to tell X from Y then there is no difference between X and Y. That is not to say everyone’s observations are perfect, but imperfection in observation is compensated for by inconsistency of observation. Experimentation isn’t merely a means of discovering truth, that is the very definition of truth. If I, in a consistent way experience the world as if X were true, X is true.
RS: 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: By arguing for some additional perspective, a higher truth, you are subtly reintroducing theism. That is you are trying to create an observer whose observations, whose frame, is perfect.
RS: I am not subtly introducting it, I am bringing it in with a wrecking ball. It is not just that there is an Observer who is perfect, but that from all eternity He as freely and unchangingly ordained whatever would come to pass. Things happen because He has ordained for them to happen. If there is no sovereign Ordainer of truth, then you could know absolutely nothing about nothing.
Old Post RS: So logic is simply a method for manipulating statements, which might tell you something about how you conduct experiments according to your senses. If logic does not stand above your sense experiences, then logic is simply a way for you to manipulate data and statements to conform them to your self-interests and self-love.
CD-Host: Correct, mostly. But be careful here. It is in my self-interest to have my logical system be consistent with experimental results. I don’t have any interests beyond that. Your phrasing, “self love” seems to imply some sort of ulterior motive.
RS: Self-interest comes from self-love.
Old Post RS: If logic does not help that, then there is no such thing as logic in reality.
CD-Host: Again note what you are saying here. That I can construct a logic which allows me to take experimentally true statements, combine and manipulate them to generate only other experimentally true statements and that’s not really a logic. That’s reality there is no reality beyond that.
RS: Your use of logic to try to defeat other statements shows that down deep you really believe in a law of logic that stands above and judges what we say. You say that there is no reality beyond that, but you have presupposed that and have no basis from your empirical process to show that.
Old Post RS: So the moment I decide to torture and kill you that means you have no way of saying that what I am about to do is wrong.
CD-Host: Of course I do. I don’t have any way of saying it is “ultimately wrong” in some sense that has nothing to do with human experience. But since you and I are both humans I don’t need to. You and I can discuss morality from a vast shared frame.
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.
Old Post RS: It is nothing more than everything revolves around you and you end up trying to control the things you want to find the results you want.
CD-Host: Yes that is what life is. DNA is a protein that is something capable of manipulating and controlling its environment. DNA has intent, self replication. All life are machines built by DNA for the purpose of copying DNA.
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. They have been written into the universe and they are written into you as well. They demonstrate to you and all that you have been created for a purpose and yet you want to live for yourself rather than God.
Old Post RS: No one has any meaning nor can they do anything that has meaning.
CD-Host: Nonsense. No one has some sort of ultimate divine meaning. That doesn’t prevent much more limited meanings from existing.
RS: Once again you are simply lying to yourself, or perhaps you are adjusting things to fit with what you want to be true. If there is no ulitmate divine meaning, then all the things that you think have no meaning are without meaning themselves. 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? According to your position, you are nothing but an adult germ headed toward eternal extinction along with this planet. That means you have no meaning and it is as meaningless to die or kill as it is to let live or live. You have no empirical evidence to show that you have the slightest bit of meaning at all and your position screams the opposite. 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?
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We might ask this question in terms of the Atheistic Euthyphro dilemma: Are actions good because they are universally and inherently good, OR are actions good because people universally declare them to be so?
The later. My evidence for that is that humans seem unable to distinguish between the goods that are specific to their culture and the goods that are much widely shared. Now that being said I can come pretty close to the former. For the overwhelming majority of actions the nature of humanity and human culture is such that they will agree on the goods and we can call define these as inherent goods. Atheists can meaningfully talk about inherent goods, by which they mean things they believe all cultures will have and will uphold. They may be factually wrong, but the concept can exist.
Moreover, I’d argue a the base level a good deal of our moral philosophy is so clearly tied to our biology that it is shared by even non human cultures of animals close to us, like dogs or dolphins.
If the second, then we have to ask why people have the right to define what is good.
Outside of a moral philosophy you can’t talk about a right to do anything, you can simply talk about behaviors. Inside the moral philosophy they have the right to define what is good because human goods are achieved by teaching and spreading morality.
That was a surprise: I was expecting utilitarianism and got Ayn Rand instead. So: How did you land on “enlightened self-interest” instead of Kant, Mill, Singer, Rawls, or Aristotle?
I think you may be reading too much into enlightened self interest. Ayn Rand and Mills disagree on questions of theory about how technological innovations emerge. Once you mod that out they mostly agree. What’s important is that a Randian a Christian and a utilitarian can discuss morality. They know what each other is talking about. They experience the world as if they shared a fairly close agreement on the good, and on most actions their philosophies are in agreement. There are some edge cases, and abortion is one of them, where their philosophies disagree but even there there is broad agreement on the nature of the good.
Imagine an alternate dialogue where there wasn’t agreement: the Christian asserts that Abortion is wrong because it kills an innocent child. And instead of getting a response using a moral frame he agrees with instead he gets a response from a total alien morality like, “I agree it is wrong to kill the innocent on Tuesdays. On Friday’s and Monday’s it is a good thing. So we should subsidize abortion on Friday’s and Mondays and ban it on Tuesdays“. That’s what moral debates would look like if Erik’s theory about morality being dependent on Christianity were true. People with different religious beliefs would be unable to even talk morality, they way that they are unable to talk meaningfully talk liturgy because liturgy does vary greatly between religions.
So at least on this level that atheist morality exists and isn’t broadly different from Christian morality the differences between Rand and Mills and Stewart and…. fade away as details. The reason that asserting that atheism preaches psychopathic morality is not just a lie but is also an insult is because atheist morality rejects psychopathic morality. That is to say, the reason Erik thought that I’d be insulted with his claims about atheisms is because he knows that atheists actually mostly do share Christian morals and thus wouldn’t want to affirm psychopathic morals.
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CD-Host: Imagine an alternate dialogue where there wasn’t agreement: the Christian asserts that Abortion is wrong because it kills an innocent child. And instead of getting a response using a moral frame he agrees with instead he gets a response from a total alien morality like, “I agree it is wrong to kill the innocent on Tuesdays. On Friday’s and Monday’s it is a good thing. So we should subsidize abortion on Friday’s and Mondays and ban it on Tuesdays“.
Sometimes, it feels like that. Probably on both sides. 🙂
Outside of a moral philosophy you can’t talk about a right to do anything, you can simply talk about behaviors.
Here we are asking the meta-question again: Is it legitimate to test a belief system using that same belief system? I say Yes, you say No, John Lennon says I Don’t Know (or was that Paul M?).
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.
CD: Ayn Rand and Mills disagree on questions of theory about how technological innovations emerge. Once you mod that out they mostly agree.
Hm. Not so sure about that. I don’t recall Mill arguing that altruism is a moral evil. Singer sure does not.
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CD: My assertion was that the intuition which sees a simple relationship between prime generators (prime numbers), maximal ideals and unique factorization was wrong.
OK, so the specific wrong proposition you have in mind is
“All elements have a unique factorization in primes.”
Which is only true in prime ideal domains.
Alright, I can live with that. To extend a bit, when we learn linear algebra, we have to unlearn the tendency to think of matrix multiplication as commutative.
I would put it like this: mathematicians have to learn to think of properties and theorems (commutative property of multiplication, Prime Factorization Theorem) as belonging to specific classes of objects. If we create a new class, we must justify each property or theorem for that class and not simply “argue by analogy.”
Are we square now?
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Did your change in stance on abortion coincide with or affect your loss of faith, or was it unrelated?
Semi-unrelated. As an evangelical I was a moderate, I supported heavily regulated and discouraged abortion. The left end of the pro-life movement though was at that point against “abortion on demand” or “state funding for abortions”. Things like fetal personhood weren’t even on the table. No one I ever met argued that fertilization and not pregnancy was the start of protected life, I never heard discussion of abortifacients. The debate was about things like informed consent, and in opposing things like informed consent laws the left at that time was arguing for (IMHO) a right to moral cowardice. So I had no trouble agreeing with pro-lifers on the actual policy debates.
Certainly there were pro-lifers that wanted abortion to be murder, and they meant it. As an evangelical I did not want to consider abortion doctors guilty of 1st degree murder and the women who procure abortions guilty of 2nd degree murder, I was definitely opposed to that. I didn’t know what abortion law enforcement had been like in actual practice 1870s-1970s and what people were starting to talk about in terms of murder was already far more than I was willing to support. But mainly the battle was different then. The right in general was interested in growing and reaching out to a public which was discouraged with liberalism but wasn’t necessarily conservative. Moderates on both sides who disliked absolutists and wanted a workable political compromise were in charge.
I’ve certainly moved left on abortion since then, but not too much. What’s happened though is the left and the right have both moved right quite a bit and so now I’m a comfortable pro-choicer even though my views are only a little changed from what they were 25 years ago.
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cd: I lost at bingo before the creation of the world. My pre-creation bingo skill is what matters.
mark: You are not an unitarian but an atheist? I understand you to be denying that it’s your fault that you were not elected to be saved by grace. And then you deny that this means that you deny “my fault” and “not my fault” when it comes to other issues.
Romans 3:3 What if some were unfaithful? Does their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God? 4 By no means! Let God be true though everyone were a liar, as it is written, “That you may be justified in your words, and prevail when you are judged.” 5 But if our unrighteousness serves to show the righteousness of God, what shall we say? That God is unrighteous to inflict wrath on us? (I speak in a human way.) 6 By no means! For then how could God judge the world? 7 But if through my lie God’s truth abounds to his glory, why am I still being condemned as a sinner? 8 And why not do evil that good may come?—as some people slander us with saying. Their condemnation is just.
I know some Calvinists (I was one of them) who think it is enough to say that God is sovereign. In this emphasis, sometimes they even project their own ego onto God, and sound like they think of themselves as sovereign also.
But the truth of the gospel is not only God’s sovereignty but also God’s righteousness. This means that the gospel is not only about the justification of the elect sinner but also about the justification of God. To justify God does not of course mean that we make God just. Rather, it means that we declare that God is just.
When God justifies an elect sinner, it’s not only God’s sovereignty that declares the sinner just. God is justified in justifying the elect sinner because 1. Christ died because of the imputed guilt of that elect sinner and 2. God then righteously count that elect sinner to legally share in that death. Because of these two facts of history, God is justified in justifying elect sinners. But cd is not explicitly denying God’s justice in the election of some sinners. Cd is only denying that his non-election is his fault. Sure, he sins even against his own ideals, but those who are elect are sinners also.
And I agree with CD that, from his angle, none of this is good news and it certainly doesn’t look just. To jump to the most important scandal. The elect sinners go free. Christ, who did not sin, died. Why does not that just make things worse?
This is why we who are somewhat sure that we are elect are tempted to say that the whole thing is only about God’s sovereignty and then tell people to shut their mouths and ask no questions.But the Bible itself does not take that attitude. The Bible tells us how God thinks. The Bible justifies God.
Romans 9 does not only ask: “who are you to talk back to God”. Romans 9 explains that it is inappropriate for that which is made to sit in negative judgment on the maker. That which is made is instead to make the positive judgment that God has the righteous right to harden as many as God hardens. Since God is the Creator, it’s not completely “arbitrary” for God to do this.. It’s not the same as you being a parent and thinking that gives you the right to tell your (adult) children what to do.
Romans 6 deals with the objection that God justifying sinners will cause sinners to rationalize their sins, so that they not only say that their sins were predestined but also that they say that more sins result in more grace.
The Romans 6 answer is that grace is either grace or not. There is not more or less grace, but either grace or no grace. If elect, grace. If non-elect, no grace, no early grace, no profane grace, no creation grace. More sin does not get the elect more grace, because all those God justly justifies have all the grace any other elect person has. If you have grace, then you are justified from sin, and if you don’t have grace, you are a sinner “free from righteousness” (6:20).
When we hear things that sound too good to be true, often that is because they are not true. The truth is that none of us have stopped being sinners. There are only two kind of sinners, —guilty sinners and justified sinners .
The theodicy of Romans 3 announces that God is true even if every man is a liar. We are to justify God because God has revealed Himself as just.. And God has revealed that God is more than sovereign. And God’s word is justified in history by what God did when Christ gave Himself up to death on the cross because of the imputed guilt of the elect.
We were all born wrong: God was right and God is still right. God prevails, but it is not only a matter of “might makes right” or “sovereignty always wins”. We have no right to make a negative judgment on God. It is God who will be making a negative judgment on many sinners.
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What Mark said.
CD, you say you “lost the election lottery”, but that assumes that you will continue in your unbelief. Who knows what the future holds? The lottery ticket is not punched until “once we die, and after that, the judgment.”
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Mark —
You are not an unitarian but an atheist? I understand you to be denying that it’s your fault that you were not elected to be saved by grace. And then you deny that this means that you deny “my fault” and “not my fault” when it comes to other issues.
You can go in the direction of absolute sovereignty and assert that God is possessed of a perfect morality that is not subject to human judgement, but that is just a pretty way of saying that God is fundamentally immoral or at the very least amoral. You aren’t really objecting the content as much as the lack of reverent tone. For God to be moral in any meaningful sense means that his actions are moral by human standards. Either we can judge them moral, or saying they are moral by some divine definition is no different then saying they are tomatoes.
I think Calvin did a fantastic job in trying to derive doctrine from scripture, in the sense of reading scripture as it was read in the 16th century. But a lot of what Calvin says on a whole bunch of topics fundamentally depends on a reverent tone to make it sound plausible. Take virtually the entire Westminster confession and rephrase it in a irreverent tone and what he’s saying violates common sense violently. Arminianism, semi-Pelagianism or outright Pelagianism at least seem morally plausible. And for the same reason NPP and FV are popular in Reformed communities, is the fact that orthodox Calvinism fails to reconcile a moral God with a TULIP. He can be moral by definition but moral by definition doesn’t mean anything, it is a claim without content. I agree with your read of Romans 9 (from a Calvinist perspective) but all that does is pushes the whole debate back a level with another “because I said so”.
Anyway the righteousness of Calvin’s conception of God is yet another heavy topic.
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CD – Your constant assertions about what atheists need to believe are ridiculous. I keep trying to get atheist morals off the ground by explaining to you the basic and you keep screaming that real atheists should be immoral.
I haven’t said that atheists “need” to believe anything. The whole concept of “needing” to do anything disappears when you are an atheist.
I’m not “screaming”. If I was screaming I would be using all caps like Old Bob.
I haven’t said that atheists “should” be immoral. The whole concept of “should” disappears when you are an atheist. I am merely making a case for what is rational.
I think you are so wrapped-up in your worldview that you can not get outside it for awhile to really examine it. I have had this conversation with other atheists and they were in the same spot that you are.
CD – If you want to stick your fingers in your ears and scream la-la-la-la-la then there is nothing I can say.
I’m listening, I just haven’t been convinced of anything yet.
CD – Atheist moral philosophy exists and has existed for millennia.
So has Christianity. The age of a religion or philosophy has no bearing on whether or not it is true.
CD – In the real world there are no fumes of Christianity
A lot of people who are no longer (or never were) Christians seem to want to use a lot of Christian language and categories.
CD – Being told to do stuff by your invisible friend is not the only basis for anything
You know you’ve frustrated an atheist when they pull out the “invisible friend” or “man in the sky” line. How does something being invisible have anything to do with whether or not it exists?
CD – There are entire works about construction of meaning and morality by atheists
There are also entire works written by Christians. The fact that people have written on these things does not necessarily make them true.
CD – Humans are one of the few species capable of organizing societies of unrelated members which engage in complex webs of interdependency. Atheists live in those societies as much as theists. Atheists benefit from those societies as much as theists. One doesn’t have to believe in God to not want to undermine the social structures necessary for humans to live and thrive. Moreover, those cultures that have had the most influence on other cultures are precisely the cultures that facilitate the construction of complex societies.
This is a sociological or anthropological observation that really doesn’t have much to do with morality. People often engage in behaviors that “undermine the social structures necessary for humans to live and thrive” and are tolerated (if not celebrated) by irreligious people. For example, what is the positive contribution made by homosexuality from an evolutionary perspective? Of the counterculture? Of drug use? Of being on welfare for generations? I’m describing a large segment of the modern Democratic Party in the U.S.
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.
I’m not saying “atheists have a moral obligation to act in ways that undermine the ability for humans to maintain complex societies.” I’m saying an atheist should feel no moral obligations.
Ironically, I would have more success gaining tenure in a major university today asserting the world is flat than asserting intelligent design. The former might be seen as a quirky expression of “academic freedom”, the latter seen as an attempt to violate academic freedom (see Ben Stein’s “Expelled”).
CD – The problem with psychopathic moralities that you keep proposing is that they fail obvious game theory tests.
As an individual why should I care in the least about “game theory tests” All I need to care about is maximizing my pleasure during the time I am alive. For example, if my wife is pregnant the thing that would be most beneficial for society is for me to stay with her, word hard, and prepare to support our child. If, however, I go to Vegas for the weekend with my buddies and meet a sexy showgirl, I might decide that I would rather shack up with her and dump my responsibilities back home. Neither choice is morally superior to the other. I may experience some consequences during this life (my paycheck might get garnished down the road to pay for child support), but there are no consequences after I am dead (and doggone gone it, my wife was getting fat and that showgirl was hot!). Let’s talk about how liberals value sexual freedom above almost all else sometime and the implications of that idea for society.
CD – To pick your last example, if everyone is engaging in theft, then individuals with any property have to constantly fight one another. This makes additional property accumulation almost impossible. When this psychopathic culture comes in contact with a culture with higher levels of cooperation the individuals in it will draw it into conflict with the high cooperation culture. War is a high cooperation activity so the psychopathic society will lose. A gene that quickly kills an individual is a defective gene. A moral structure that quickly kills a culture is a defective moral structure. There is no need for a god to assert things that basic.
You are really tempting me to make more comments on the American Democratic Party but I will try to resist. Once again, you are talking about things on a Macro level which have no bearing on my individual choices as an atheist. As Keynes said, “The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.”
CD – Atheists are not psychopaths. It is not a failure of atheism that it denies this psychopathic morality you keep trying to assert is its only natural state.
You don’t have to be a psychopath to see the implications of atheism on morality, just a realist. Ayn Rand wrote a book called “The Virtues of Selfishness”, after all.
Sextus Empiricus, for whom empiricism is named thought hard about how to put morality on a firm foundation which was universal, i.e. based on reason. He lists 5:
That’s all nice, but at this point he’s just a dead guy and is not the boss of me.
For a more recent example In 2008 Jonathan Haidt, an atheist, published a book on moral foundations theory. Which was an attempt to determine what sort of moral mechanisms might exist in humans, where morality is a mechanisms for allowing cooperative structures. It appears there are 6 sort of core moral ideas that are cross cultural and possessed by all individuals: care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. Individuals in a culture possess weightings of these 6 variables and a cultural understanding of how to apply them to specific acts.
I’ve heard of Haidt’s book and read an interview with him in the Wall Street Journal that I posted on my blog: “He Knows Why We Fight: The Weekend Interview With Jonathan Haidt”
The article says, “His research shows that conservatives are much better at understanding and anticipating liberal attitudes than liberals are at appreciating where conservatives are coming from.”
I would cite our exchange as confirmation of that notion.
Haidt’s observations could just as easily be seen as evidence of a common creator.
You need to embrace what I am telling you. You could spend more time on the beach and less time fighting with Christians online. In the immortal words of the late Freddy Mercury:
Ooh yeah, ooh yeah
Nothing really matters
Anyone can see
Nothing really matters – nothing really matters to me
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My apologies to Freddie Mercury for misspelling his name.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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: 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.
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. 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.
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?
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.
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?
You and Mark need to talk. That’s sounding a lot like conditional election. 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. 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.
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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).
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. Since you are refusing to define sense experience as “truth” the rest of the argument has to wait. 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.
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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.
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@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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).”
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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?
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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.
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@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.
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@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.
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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.
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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.
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@ 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
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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You nailed in with a good post with a handful of good info
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