Crime + punishment

[Kingpoleon]

That is why the Golden Rule should be the universal basis for all moral and ethical systems.

Systems which have nothing to do with organized religions, which are man-made political constructs. 

Some religions are political constructs - most notably Confucianism - but to say that all are equally so is objectively incorrect.

[Kingpoleon]

In the Christian conception, the reason sin merits eternal punishment is because it is a crime against an infinitely good God first and foremost even when the offense is against other people, as we see in Psalm 51:4.  A materialist worldview lacks this kind of grounding of sin being an offense against an all-good being because none could exist, and I think this, more than the lack of immortality, is the ultimate moral challenge for a naturalistic worldview.

This sounds more like Dostoevsky than Lewis, which is rather surprising for an evangelical.

[Kingpoleon]

I honestly don't see why biological predisposition or social conventions are any more problematic groundings for morality than the arbitrary* dictates of a supreme being.

*if not arbitrary then the standard is higher than God and you get the grounding problem of what exactly that is again

Not arbitrary. Given the idea that God is supreme and superior to us, then our inability to fully grasp morality’s workings stems from our own inferiority, not the arbitrary nature of morality.

Natural law has outpaced its critics on a cosmic scale. Even given that a biological predisposition can correctly create(NOT find) morality, then there is the whole question of natural laws aside from morality. The best explanation to the existence of laws within the universe is their creation by something outside of and superior to the universe. The sole alternative, that laws exist within the universe in and of themselves, poses a contradiction. Show me a nation with laws and no lawmaker and I will concede the possibility of a universe with laws and no lawmaker.

[Kingpoleon]

There is no real contradiction as long as you don't attempt to bind God to the subjective preferences of modern liberalism.

I dissent. Even granted that an individual’s preferences are objective, it is impossible for a lesser being to be the judge of a higher being. The Supreme Court is superior to the appeals courts by its very nature - to have the former be judged by the latter is logically incomprehensible. A thousand times more illogical is it for man to pass judgment on God.

[Kingpoleon]

     I made my statement with an eye to Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory. I don't know how aware you are of the concept, but he developed a theory that measured a person's understanding of morality based on emphasizing a number of foundations. Liberals tended to emphasize the foundation of Care much more than anything else, while conservatives emphasized Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity as well as Care. Both groups put moderate emphasis on Fairness.

     With that in mind, your contention here (which I agree with, for the record), which is predicated on the concept that the authority to judge rightly belongs to some and not to others, already operates outside of the orthodoxy of liberal morality. The lack of deference given to authority in the morality of the modern liberal is key to why many of our fellows in this thread believe they can judge God's morality by the standards that seem appropriate to them.

I should note that I operate under the assumption of balancing things against each other. I do not care for authority for its own sake - rather, I grant the case through a rationalist’s lens. The existence of an infinite God alone refutes challenges to its own authority, which is why I pointed out that it was silly to argue that a greater being has no authority to judge a lesser being.

[Kingpoleon]

You are begging the question here by assuming your conclusion that an omnibenevolent God exists to prove it.

That is because the original post granted such an existence, but merely questioned God’s morality.

[Kingpoleon]

Most of this is unrelated to my point really.

Asserting the existence of natural law is no reason to believe in God. Plenty of atheists believe in natural law, many contemporary Kantian ethicists for example. This debate is about what grounds something like natural law, not whether it exists or not.

Saying that God is a superior being is also besides the point. You still have the grounding problem of getting an ought from an is no less than people who explain morality from biology do. If God murders someone for their own divine pleasure is that really automatically good because God did it? How is this not arbitrary?

The two are also contradictory. If natural law exists then God is subject to it, so he's not unfathomably morally superior as he can be judged by that standard.


Speaking generally, exactly how one gets morality out of God is an extremely thorny theological problem that has been debated for thousands of years and has received multiple different answers. There's no advantage to theism such that belief in God is preferable because by itself it solves our problem of where morality comes from.

It is my charge that the natural law, like physical laws, is created by God. God is not subject to natural law for the same reason He is not subject to physical laws preventing miracles. Unlike republican lawmakers, a majestic lawmaker is not just the creator of the laws, but superior to the laws. You might as well allege that there is no advantage to theism such that belief in God because by itself it solves our problem of where miracles come from.

I've never found the "offense against an all-good victim" explanation for eternal punishment at all compelling, honestly. It's the sort of theological concept that seems like a reflection of the extremely hierarchical and clientelistic society in which it originated rather than a timeless statement about the ways of God to man. The explanation that hell is in some sense a voluntary refusal of God that can't be "taken back" for reasons internal to the human soul has always struck me as a lot more economical and less legalistic.

Before anybody accuses me of theological liberalism, let me clarify that if I did think RFayette and PiT's position had a robust explanatory power, I wouldn't reject it out of personal squeamishness.

I should note here my second dissent, as a Protestant.

If the moral law has at least some relationship to a God-given conscience, then, if eternal damnation or destruction incites the conscience of some, it is very possible that it not theologically factual. No claims on the subject ought to be authoritative in nature, but rather submissive to the finality of God’s judgment.

[Kingpoleon]

Natural laws, physical or moral, depend on the natural properties and relationships which he created.  We can imagine God intervening to change physical properties or the relationships between physical objects.  But a suspension of the moral law would then require some change in the beings or objects upon which is being acted.  What does this mean?  In order for it to suddenly be good to kill an innocent person, there would need to be some change in that person's essence, or somehow in the nature of goodness itself.  And if goodness changes, then God must change along with it if he is ultimate goodness.

I did not mean to imply that the moral law could be suspended as natural laws can be. Simply that accepting God as sovereign prevents His violation of His own moral law.

[Kingpoleon]

I am not criticizing Divine Command Theory though. I am very explicitly criticizing the specific argument that human beings have no business interrogating the moral standards set by an infinite God using their own intuitions and cognitive faculties. I don't think those two need to be synonymous. It seems perfectly possible to me to believe that God created moral laws and endowed us with the ability to understand them though sincere, disinterested inquiry. In this case, the reason we should be moral might be "because God says so", but the way we find out what God has to say is not limited to looking at the literal word of God, but can actually take into account fundamental intuitions and deductions.

I was using very narrow wording in morality as a whole. Obviously, I believe that reason is a sound basis for questioning morality in terms of interpersonal action. But in terms of the afterlife, I dispute the very notion of people making authoritative claims about its nature. I do not even think judges should be allowed to judge someone unworthy of this life - I certainly do not think people should judge others’ worthiness of the afterlife. The idea of resolving, by philosophical debate, something which has rarely gotten wide consensus in any large religious denomination in over two thousand years is nonsense. I merely indicate that if God 1) created the afterlife, 2) we don’t know its exact functions, then 3) it is odd to claim that its exact functions are immoral, because we 4) would be subjecting a superior being to a lesser being’s judgment and 5) only do so as a criticism of an idea expressed by an equal being. Therefore, these are not criticisms of God, but criticisms of the hypothetical actions of God said to exist by someone else without authoritative consensus. To be outraged over a posited hypothetical is the highest form of moral pretension.

[Kingpoleon]

Now, forgive me if I'm wrong, but my understanding of some of the arguments made in these thread by you and others was that the second premise is invalid because we simply cannot grasp what is just or unjust in terms of the afterlife, because God's understanding of justice is infinitely deeper that ours. I am defending our ability to make such a premise, because I don't believe it is reasonable to disregard the tools that God gave us to grasp the basic morality of God's actions. Of course I don't pretend to claim that human beings might be able to discern the fullness of God's plan with regard to the afterlife - I understand that most of that realm is unfathomable for us finite beings. But that doesn't mean we cannot rule out any hypotheses. In the specific case of eternal damnation, I do believe that the tools we have can allow us to reach a clear conclusions as to whether or not such an outcome can be consonant to our basic intuitions about justice. And while it is true that our conclusions can be flawed because we are finite beings, I still reject the idea that this means the inquiry itself is inappropriate.

It is certainly possible to use our reason to make claims of the afterlife in relationship to the moral law. However, it is not possible for us to be as authoritative about the morality of the afterlife as the morality of this life because the two are inherently different.

To me, the argument sounds similar to another one:
1. God is infinitely just.
2. There is injustice in the world.
3. Therefore, either God does not exist, or He is not infinitely just.

Both claims are similarly flawed because they fail to take into account that just the extremity of the first premise. Once it is granted, then our own claims about the morality of God’s actions are laughable unless we actually claim to be infinitely just ourselves, or at least maximally just.

To respond to those who claim to believe in objective morality or natural law but not God, allow me to quote Kant: “Morality in itself constitutes a system, but happiness does not, except insofar as it is distributed precisely in accordance with morality. This, however, is possible only in the intelligible world, under a wise author and regent. Reason sees itself as compelled either to assume such a thing, together with life in such a world, which we must regard as a future one, or else to regard the moral laws as empty figments of the brain.”

[Kingpoleon]

First off, this is not how syllogisms work. You can't use one premise to reject another. The whole point of a premise is that if you set it, you have accepted it as true (for the sake of the argument at least) and must follow it to all its logical conclusions. I know it's a a pedantic point and you could easily rearrange your propositions to express the idea you're getting at more accurately, but since you were explicitly trying to turn my own logic against me, I feel obligated to point out that you missed the mark.

Moving on to the substantive point, there is no doubt that the existence of injustice in the world we inhabit is one of the greatest challenges of Christian theology, and piles and piles of volumes have been written to try to grapple with this conundrum. The very fact that many theologians have considered this issue and attempted to provide at least tentative answers already undermines your claim that it's just not something we can even begin to understand. Even if we can't fully understand it, clearly we can make some degree of progress toward a better understanding.

But besides, as challenging as the problem of evil in our material, finite world might be to Christianity, it is nothing when compared to the notion of infinite suffering in the afterlife. Fundamentally, the idea of suffering in a finite context is not inherently incompatible with the idea of infinite justice, since the latter is so great as to make the former utterly irrelevant in comparison. Any finite amount of suffering can be made right given an infinite amount of justice. Infinity minus a very large number is still infinity, after all. Of course, the question still remains as to why even a finite amount of suffering is necessary to begin with, and that is of course a tricky and complex question, but even if we don't understand the reason for it, we have no definitive proof that such a reason cannot exist.

On the other hand, once you add eternal damnation into the equation, the evil also becomes infinite. Even if just a single person is damned, if the harm is extended over an eternity, it becomes impossible to account it as constituting part of a greater good - it's simply big enough to break any such account.* And clearly, coming to such a conclusion is well within our human faculties. We understand what suffering is - this is arguably one of the defining features of our mortal lives - and while we cannot experience infinity itself, extrapolating from a finite amount to an infinite amount IS something we have experience doing in all sorts of domains. So with those empirical and logical premises set, I think reason leads us fairly straightforwardly to such a conclusion.

*The only way that can make sense is if you're willing to claim that suffering can be a positive good, rather than being at most a necessary evil, but I find such a claim beyond contemptible and if you disagree I don't think we have much else to say to each other.

I am happy to pedantically rearrange it, but my point was that I think any defensive response must be based in the first point, that of infinite justice.

The problem of evil is obviously very real and serious. In my time learning about theology, I have learned several broad answers: the “greater good” response; the necessity of free will; skeptical theism; afterlife theodicy (see Aquinas); turning the table; karma; and Evil God. I am advocating skeptical theism, as coined by Draper. While reason is (probably) the best cornerstone for morality, it is limited - see bounded rationality. This argument, to my knowledge, dates to the 1990s, and the vast majority of rebuttals I have read simply accuse it of philosophical laziness rather than any logical inconsistency.