Before I say anything else on the subject, I feel I ought to answer the question of why I ought to bother writing out an argument for God’s existence. I have often felt that this subject gets too much attention from Christian thinkers as it is, considering that the great majority of people believe in the existence of the supernatural already, and those among the minority of staunch atheists are unlikely to find our arguments convincing. While it is important that people have exposure to arguments that show belief in God to be reasonable rather than the idiotic superstition it is sometimes made out to be, there probably are more pressing issues with which the Christian apologist should concern himself.
The truth is, I have developed this argument less out of interest in convincing skeptics (I doubt it would be much good for that) than as an exercise in applying some philosophical ideas. It is a way in which I can see how a particular framework of thought fits together with my Biblical worldview. Moreover, if God is in fact the ultimate center of all reality, ways in which our understanding can logically connect with and affirm his existence will give us possible insights into the nature of the universe which is both our habitat and his creation. I call this argument ‘the argument from universals and particulars in dialogue’, or, in its alternative form, ‘the argument from laws and entities in dialogue.’
I want to begin by briefly giving an overview of the philosophical systems of Plato and Aristotle, particularly on the subject of form, matter, universals and particulars. For Plato, the elevation of form over matter and of universals over particulars is central. He understood reality to consist of two realms: the physical realm of particulars which we experience through our senses, and an idea realm of universals which we attain through our minds. He believed that the physical world was an imperfect copy or dim reflection of the ideal world of the forms.
This form-matter dichotomy has made Platonic thought popular among Christians and other theists for thousands of years. It seems to clearly express the idea that this material world is not all there is; that it is the product of something greater than itself. It fits nicely with the idea that there is both a physical realm and a spiritual realm, that a spiritual God created the physical world, and that although it still reflects his design, it does so in a lesser, tarnished way.
Aristotle, who was dissatisfied with Plato’s conception of form, advanced his own. According to Aristotle, form was not something existing universally on some higher plane distinct from all physical reality. To him, form was to be found within the particulars of our earthly experience. He defined form as the essence which gives particular things their own nature. For example, the form of redness is to be found in all red objects. The form of sphericality is to be found in every ball. This sort of form, of course, is not something aloof and heavenly. It refers simply to qualities manifest in particular things, not existing apart from them.
In short, Plato saw the forms and universals to presuppose the existence of substances and particulars, whereas Aristotle saw substances and particulars to be the host of forms and universal qualities, and therefore, to presuppose them. All of this, of course, is nothing at all new to anyone who is familiar with Plato and Aristotle. However, more interesting considerations emerge when we ask “who was right?”
Taking each of their understandings separately, they both seem very logical, but put them in dialogue, and they seem to disprove each other; that is to say, unless a third element is introduced that unifies them and provides an escape from what seems to be a contradiction.
Let’s take a few examples. First, let’s consider ‘redness’. Let us ask the question “where does redness come from? Do particular examples of red things derive from a universal form of redness, or is the universal form of redness merely a distillation of the nature of all particular red objects?” Looking at the question from Plato’s point of view, the truth of the first statement is apparent. After all, how is it possible for anything to be red unless the concept of red already existed? It is hardly feasible to suppose that the color red itself was one day inaugurated into existence when the first red thing spontaneously appeared. Particular red things must be presupposed by the existence of the color red.
But let’s not stop there. Where does this property we call ‘redness’ come from? According to Plato, it exists in the non-physical world of the forms. But this is problematic, because redness is by its very essence a physical property. Not only this, but it seems a bit silly to suggest that ‘red’ can exist by itself apart from any particular red thing. It seems as though it must necessarily be resident in either a particular object or else in a creative mind capable of thinking up such things. The alternative is that there are in fact properties which exist by themselves, which, to use an analogy from grammar, is like having adjectives all by themselves without any subject or object. In fact, one could quite possible make an argument for God’s existence simply off of the idea that there are certain properties which we take to be real, such as perfect goodness, whose existence only make sense if they are the in fact properties of something, or in the case of goodness, someone.
Of course, ‘redness’ seems to be a bit of a trivial example, and using it as such brings in the complication arising from the fact that color is an essentially physical quality, which distances it somewhat from Plato’s concept of form. Perhaps a more meaningful case to examine would be the concept of justice.
First of all, with a nod to Plato’s system, it needs to be recognized that to talk about particular acts of justice without some universal standard is meaningless. The form of justice must have an existence above and beyond individual acts, since these are obviously presupposed by a larger framework into which they fit. But then, with a nod to Aristotle, it seems equally nonsensical to speak of a universal quality of justice simply hovering in an abstract thought realm apart from being manifest in particular actions, or especially persons. How can we have thoughts without a thinker? Or again, to use our analogy from grammar (and grammar is the verbal expression of the logic that undergirds our thinking) we might point out the foolishness of talking about justice as a concept independent of any just being or any being in whose mind justice exists. We might put it this way: nobody can be just unless there is first such a thing as the quality of justice, and yet, there can be no such thing as the quality of justice if nothing or nobody has ever possessed it.
What can we conclude from this? That we have built a system of metaphysics which relies on two seemingly undeniable yet contradictory propositions? How can have a view of reality which rests on a foundation of circular reasoning? We can’t. (Or at least, shouldn’t. This advice hasn’t stopped some thinkers.) But the good news is that there is a way out. This approach to metaphysics has been built upon a necessary polarity between universal forms and particular entities, but so far we have erroneously built a false dichotomy between them. The answer to the riddle can only be found in some sort of entity which is both universal and particular; a being which possesses, if you will, absolute particularity. It is the sort of being who can think up the color red out of nothing, so that there is both a universal form of redness, and also a real example of it in its creative output. It is the sort of being who is innately just, such that justice itself becomes a universal quality, and yet is truly manifest. This was, I deem, a mistake of Plato’s: he supposed that whatever was greatest in the universe must be universal, and not particular, when in fact what is logically necessary is a being who is particular; who can be a singular point of origin for all else and an entity in which qualities can be manifest in a real way, and at the same time be itself the universal standard of these qualities. Of course, such a being is God: a being who is both personal and absolute, whose mind may contain what Plato calls the world of the forms and yet satisfy Aristotle’s requirement that a form must be a quality which is manifest in an actual, particular entity.
To make this argument perhaps more clear, we might rephrase it into another set of terms. Just as we have already divided the universe into the categories of universals and particular as well as forms and substances, we may also divide it in terms of laws and entities. An entity is something which may be in some general way spoken of as a ‘thing’. We speak this broadly because we want to have a category that includes both physical objects and also allows for the possibility of non-physical beings. The other category, law, refers to activities of entities. It refers to the whole consideration of motion, energy, and why things behave and interact the way that we do. Like before, we might arrange the categories of law and entity into a self-contradictory dichotomy.
Let’s start with entities. It is obvious enough that laws, under our broad terms, are necessary to make sense of the world of particular entities. Without it, nothing is defined. All interrelations become impossible. Matter doesn’t stick together. All that we have are particles of nondescript ‘stuff’ floating randomly through space. This makes it clear that laws must presuppose entities; in fact, it seems as though laws must in a sense be a creative force behind the formation of entities.
However, let’s look at it from the other direction. Let’s take seriously the idea of laws presupposing entities. Is it possible to have laws without the objects to which laws refer? Conceivably, yes. But this also seems very counter-intuitive. What is the point of having laws if there is nothing for them to govern? That would be like getting to be king of the north pole: you would have a fancy title and theoretical authority, but without any subjects, your reign would be fairly meaningless. Not only this, but laws depend on entities to be able to operate. Let’s take the law of gravity, for instance. Can the law of gravity make someone fall all by itself? No; what we need is the force of gravity. There’s a difference. A law is a principle which describes reality and determines the way it behaves, and a force is an interaction of particles between objects (in the case of gravity). In this case, the law of gravity, which is itself nonphysical, takes effect through the force of gravity, which is a physical relation. While entities depend on laws, laws also require entities as their tools to take affect in the physical world.
In this way, it seems as though laws, while being in some sense above material entities, don’t make any sense without them. We might put it this way: laws relate to entities causatively; entities relate to laws indicatively. In other words, while laws are the “creative authority”, if you will, behind entities, entities are invariably referred to, or indicated by, the existence of laws. Even if one is above the other, the two must go together in order to make sense of each other.
Again, this seems like a situation of necessary self-contradiction. (“Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” “Yes!”) We have two seemingly necessary threads of logic which work well enough on their own until they meet at a seemingly necessary impasse. But this may not be necessary after all. We can’t have laws without entities and we can’t have entities without laws. One cannon unilaterally create the other. But we can have a being who somehow encompasses both of these spheres so as to be an appropriate originating point for both. This being would be of such a nature that his very word would be law, and yet would be a personal entity himself; just the sort of entity whose governing laws were integrally manifest in his own nature. Again, we would of course call a being like this God.
So, what does all of this show? To the atheist, perhaps not much, because he or she probably doesn’t think too much of the whole Plato/Aristotle tradition in the first place. However, I believe that this argument shows that the universe is constructed in such a way that it doesn’t make nearly as much sense without God. If in fact the universe consists of a dialogue between form and substance or between laws and entities, there must be a mediator: a single, organic, point of origin for both who keeps these two polarities of existence in relation with one another and yet distinct.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Freedom and Original Sin
A friend of mine recently provoked me into contemplation of the concept of original sin when he expressed doubt in it, raised by the apparent inconsistency between the idea that we are born sinful and worthy of judgement beyond our own ability to be otherwise, and the idea that our moral responsibility hangs by the thread of our free will. "What a good, tough question!" I thought. The trouble is, I believe that being responsible for our wrongdoings is vitally important, and that genuine free will is an indispensable prerequisite to responsibility. At the same time, I believe in original sin. I don’t believe in the full-fledged Calvinist doctrine of total depravity, which claims that the unjustified can never do anything good whatsoever, but I do believe that we are all born with a natural desire to reject God; that is, to be sinful. And I believe that we are all held accountable before God because of this.
At one level, the conflict raised here can be easily dismissed. We need only remember that there is a difference between Sin and sins; that is to say, there is sin as a general condition affecting the whole of mankind, and individual sinful acts. There is no reason to say that because we are born into the condition of original sin, we are therefore not free to choose whether we will commit or forego particular actions, for which we are responsible. While the sinful nature we all share has a huge sway over our choices, few Christians, with the exception of strong Calvinists, believe that it controls us to such an absolute extent that in our natural state we are incapable of choosing to commit a good action. In that sense, a person may be rightly held morally responsible for his or her free choices, even while they have been born into a general situation which they did not choose.
However, we need to go deeper than this. The brunt of the problem emerges when we realize that in a way, our particular actions, while very important and deserving of judgement, are incidental. By this I do not mean that they are insignificant, but that they are symptomatic to the underlying condition of the sinful nature, or original sin. It is because of this that we can see that a person who, just for sake of argument, has lived a perfect life in terms of behavior, never doing anything wrong nor failing to do right, may be no better off in the long run than a serial killer or a pimp. Underneath their thin veneer of righteous behavior is the same problem shared by child molesters and suicide bombers. They live for their own purposes and glory rather than God’s. Righteousness for the sake of being independent from God is perhaps the worst kind sin there is.
And yet, this deepest of faults, this root condition from which all sinful actions grow and the final charge to be leveled against us but for the blood of Christ, seems to be the one sin we didn’t choose. We were born with it. And if we didn’t choose it, how can it be sin? Or alternatively, if it is sin, how could we have not chosen it?
That’s really sticky. I think C.S. Lewis poured a little bit of degreaser into the mess when he pointed out (I can’t recall where) that the fact that we can’t quite help being the way we are doesn’t make us any less deserving of wrath. Sometimes creatures can be just plain nasty apart from any consideration of freedom. I have never hesitated to kill a mosquito buzzing around my ear on the grounds that it did not choose to be a mosquito. In a simple way, we are deserving of wrath because we are broken, deformed, failed versions of what we were meant to be. If not deserving of judgement, throwing corrupted humanity to a cosmic scrap heap seems appropriate.
However, this won’t quite do (thank the Lord!) because this is not quite the situation we are in. Not quite, even if very close. Part of this whole paradox runs a parallel with the paradox of humanity itself: we are creatures, but creatures of God; we are dust, but we are God’s breath; we long to have things our own way, but we have never for a moment stopped longing for things that can only be fulfilled by God; we are tombs of darkness but we are God’s brilliant image; we are both the tragedy and crown of creation. In short, we may be sinners, but we are not mere beasts.
So it is that although the mosquito treatment won’t be such an easy way out, in the process of observing this, we are given something of hint. That hint lies in the fact that whatever might be said about the sinful state of humanity, things are not as hopeless as the doctrine of original sin would suggest if it were the only principle at work. If in fact it was the end-all description of where we are at, I fear that we would be little more than mosquitos awaiting a terminal appointment with the divine flyswatter. While we have no reason to doubt that Adam and Eve’s choice to disobey God was committed out of their complete free will, it seems we would have equally small reason to doubt that there choice might very well be the end of all freedom for those who follow in their posterity. (It is very possible that there are kinds of free choices, which, if made, take away freedom. A free man may sell himself into slavery and also lose the wealth to buy back his liberty.) After all, I think it stands to reason to believe that inasmuch as sin pushes us away from God, distance from God removes freedom. While we would rightly say that nobody ends up in hell who didn’t freely chose to go there rather than accept being present with God, nobody in hell is really free in the most meaningful sense of term. Because all life and being-hood derive from God, the further we are from him, the less real and alive we are, and eventually we may reach a point of being nothing more than an empty shadow, the negative image of a real person, a barely existent phantom clutching to nothing but itself and its own way. That may be freedom, but it is freedom with no external object. It has all capacity of choice but nothing to choose, which we might say is the worst way of being free we can imagine. All of this is to say that things very well might have followed such a path that after Adam and Eve sinned, and the human race may have quickly degenerated into senseless monsters deserving of wrath but hardly morally accountable.
But, that is not how it happened. There is definitely something else at work here. We are still made in God’s image, and even though we are all born into a race that is marred and therefore alienated from his perfection; a race that is born with a natural inclination to mistrust God and take things our own way instead, even still each one of us, from the smallest child to the bloodiest tyrant, longs for him. Of course, it goes without saying that our sin consists of trying to fulfill this longing with things he did not intend. But we all have a choice to live in one of two ways: to move towards God or away from him. All of us are on this line in and some state of motion. We are capable of feeding our original sin, but equally capable of, (and therefore responsible to) feeding our desire to know God. This is partly what Paul refers to in Romans when he argues that mankind is left without an excuse because God has revealed himself to all through nature. This is what I will call the first intrusion of God’s grace. It is the provision that we are not as bad as we might be. It is the common mercy God gives all of us: that we retain his image and never cease to long for him. We are given the gift of choosing to seek his way rather than the way of self-lordship.
And yet that only gets us so far. At the end of the day, even if we diligently pursue God, we can no more find him and become reconciled to him than an ant can wander its way to the moon. Wanting God is good and a magnificent step of repentance, but unshackling ourselves of our abiding impulse to reject him, granting ourselves pardon and restoring in ourselves the full and brilliant image of all that we were meant to be is a wee bit beyond our capability. If God left us with the first intrusion of his Grace, we would be worse off than the beast-men of our first consideration, whose corruption might contain the mercy of ignorance.
Enter the second invasion of God’s grace, the slain Christ. In fact, Christ was said to be slain before the foundations of the world. I take this to mean that ever since sin marred the face of creation, the death and resurrection of Jesus for sin was a reality, a reality fixed by the unyielding promise of the omnipotent God. The importance of this in regard to our question is that always, even from the very beginning, God has not only given people the free choice to repent of their original sin, but has possessed the means to reconcile them to himself.
This means that the question of how God could judge someone for merely being the only kind of thing they can be–a sinner–is a question foreign to the actual reality in which we live; a reality which is framed by God’s amazing grace. People are not so much judged for having Adam as an ancestor as for rejecting the grace of God. It is something we all tend to do; after all, accepting grace means accepting to live on God’s terms rather than our own and to admit that our way is insufficient. But it is not what we must do. Grace is not a pill which God makes us swallow. It is the eternal testament to our sin, our freedom, and God’s glorious love.
At one level, the conflict raised here can be easily dismissed. We need only remember that there is a difference between Sin and sins; that is to say, there is sin as a general condition affecting the whole of mankind, and individual sinful acts. There is no reason to say that because we are born into the condition of original sin, we are therefore not free to choose whether we will commit or forego particular actions, for which we are responsible. While the sinful nature we all share has a huge sway over our choices, few Christians, with the exception of strong Calvinists, believe that it controls us to such an absolute extent that in our natural state we are incapable of choosing to commit a good action. In that sense, a person may be rightly held morally responsible for his or her free choices, even while they have been born into a general situation which they did not choose.
However, we need to go deeper than this. The brunt of the problem emerges when we realize that in a way, our particular actions, while very important and deserving of judgement, are incidental. By this I do not mean that they are insignificant, but that they are symptomatic to the underlying condition of the sinful nature, or original sin. It is because of this that we can see that a person who, just for sake of argument, has lived a perfect life in terms of behavior, never doing anything wrong nor failing to do right, may be no better off in the long run than a serial killer or a pimp. Underneath their thin veneer of righteous behavior is the same problem shared by child molesters and suicide bombers. They live for their own purposes and glory rather than God’s. Righteousness for the sake of being independent from God is perhaps the worst kind sin there is.
And yet, this deepest of faults, this root condition from which all sinful actions grow and the final charge to be leveled against us but for the blood of Christ, seems to be the one sin we didn’t choose. We were born with it. And if we didn’t choose it, how can it be sin? Or alternatively, if it is sin, how could we have not chosen it?
That’s really sticky. I think C.S. Lewis poured a little bit of degreaser into the mess when he pointed out (I can’t recall where) that the fact that we can’t quite help being the way we are doesn’t make us any less deserving of wrath. Sometimes creatures can be just plain nasty apart from any consideration of freedom. I have never hesitated to kill a mosquito buzzing around my ear on the grounds that it did not choose to be a mosquito. In a simple way, we are deserving of wrath because we are broken, deformed, failed versions of what we were meant to be. If not deserving of judgement, throwing corrupted humanity to a cosmic scrap heap seems appropriate.
However, this won’t quite do (thank the Lord!) because this is not quite the situation we are in. Not quite, even if very close. Part of this whole paradox runs a parallel with the paradox of humanity itself: we are creatures, but creatures of God; we are dust, but we are God’s breath; we long to have things our own way, but we have never for a moment stopped longing for things that can only be fulfilled by God; we are tombs of darkness but we are God’s brilliant image; we are both the tragedy and crown of creation. In short, we may be sinners, but we are not mere beasts.
So it is that although the mosquito treatment won’t be such an easy way out, in the process of observing this, we are given something of hint. That hint lies in the fact that whatever might be said about the sinful state of humanity, things are not as hopeless as the doctrine of original sin would suggest if it were the only principle at work. If in fact it was the end-all description of where we are at, I fear that we would be little more than mosquitos awaiting a terminal appointment with the divine flyswatter. While we have no reason to doubt that Adam and Eve’s choice to disobey God was committed out of their complete free will, it seems we would have equally small reason to doubt that there choice might very well be the end of all freedom for those who follow in their posterity. (It is very possible that there are kinds of free choices, which, if made, take away freedom. A free man may sell himself into slavery and also lose the wealth to buy back his liberty.) After all, I think it stands to reason to believe that inasmuch as sin pushes us away from God, distance from God removes freedom. While we would rightly say that nobody ends up in hell who didn’t freely chose to go there rather than accept being present with God, nobody in hell is really free in the most meaningful sense of term. Because all life and being-hood derive from God, the further we are from him, the less real and alive we are, and eventually we may reach a point of being nothing more than an empty shadow, the negative image of a real person, a barely existent phantom clutching to nothing but itself and its own way. That may be freedom, but it is freedom with no external object. It has all capacity of choice but nothing to choose, which we might say is the worst way of being free we can imagine. All of this is to say that things very well might have followed such a path that after Adam and Eve sinned, and the human race may have quickly degenerated into senseless monsters deserving of wrath but hardly morally accountable.
But, that is not how it happened. There is definitely something else at work here. We are still made in God’s image, and even though we are all born into a race that is marred and therefore alienated from his perfection; a race that is born with a natural inclination to mistrust God and take things our own way instead, even still each one of us, from the smallest child to the bloodiest tyrant, longs for him. Of course, it goes without saying that our sin consists of trying to fulfill this longing with things he did not intend. But we all have a choice to live in one of two ways: to move towards God or away from him. All of us are on this line in and some state of motion. We are capable of feeding our original sin, but equally capable of, (and therefore responsible to) feeding our desire to know God. This is partly what Paul refers to in Romans when he argues that mankind is left without an excuse because God has revealed himself to all through nature. This is what I will call the first intrusion of God’s grace. It is the provision that we are not as bad as we might be. It is the common mercy God gives all of us: that we retain his image and never cease to long for him. We are given the gift of choosing to seek his way rather than the way of self-lordship.
And yet that only gets us so far. At the end of the day, even if we diligently pursue God, we can no more find him and become reconciled to him than an ant can wander its way to the moon. Wanting God is good and a magnificent step of repentance, but unshackling ourselves of our abiding impulse to reject him, granting ourselves pardon and restoring in ourselves the full and brilliant image of all that we were meant to be is a wee bit beyond our capability. If God left us with the first intrusion of his Grace, we would be worse off than the beast-men of our first consideration, whose corruption might contain the mercy of ignorance.
Enter the second invasion of God’s grace, the slain Christ. In fact, Christ was said to be slain before the foundations of the world. I take this to mean that ever since sin marred the face of creation, the death and resurrection of Jesus for sin was a reality, a reality fixed by the unyielding promise of the omnipotent God. The importance of this in regard to our question is that always, even from the very beginning, God has not only given people the free choice to repent of their original sin, but has possessed the means to reconcile them to himself.
This means that the question of how God could judge someone for merely being the only kind of thing they can be–a sinner–is a question foreign to the actual reality in which we live; a reality which is framed by God’s amazing grace. People are not so much judged for having Adam as an ancestor as for rejecting the grace of God. It is something we all tend to do; after all, accepting grace means accepting to live on God’s terms rather than our own and to admit that our way is insufficient. But it is not what we must do. Grace is not a pill which God makes us swallow. It is the eternal testament to our sin, our freedom, and God’s glorious love.
Friday, July 09, 2010
Of Shakespeare, Berkeley, and God
George Berkeley, an English Philosopher, was an empiricist, to the extreme that he envisioned the world as a place in which existence required that an observer be conscious of the existent thing. In such a world, things are not perceived because they exist; they exist because they are perceived.
Of course, most people have difficulty with this idea because it seems to require that we give up on our early-acquired concept of object permanence; the idea that things don’t disappear when we turn our backs to them, and re-appear as soon as we can see them again. Berkeley maintained object permanence by his belief in God. If God is omniscient, seeing everything that exists at all times, then the room doesn’t vanish when we leave it. There is still a mind comprehending it’s existence, along with the existence of everything else in the universe.
This kind of idealism (by implication even though Berkeley was an empiricist), which ascribes ultimate reality to the sphere of the mind and understands physical reality as a kind of illusion or, if you will, a hologram projection of the contents of a supreme mental sphere, sometimes takes the shape of an analogy which is commonly used to help us understand the relationship between God and the world, particularly the relationship between divine predestination and human free will. The analogy is that of God as the author of a supreme narrative, in which human persons are characters. Shakespeare is to Hamlet what God is me. In this way, we can see a way in which human actions can be free and determined at the same time. Shakespeare has imagined and written down what Hamlet will freely choose to do. This is like Berkeley’s idealism in the sense that the world is understood as an emanation of the mind of God. Just as Shakespeare imagined worlds of characters interacting in a story, so God imagined our world and its characters, and imagined it into existence.
But here’s the question: is this a good analogy? In the large scope of things, does it help or hinder our understanding of reality? I am arguing the latter, for several reasons. The first has to do with the nature of the physical world. Of course, the universe and everything in it ultimately has it’s origin in the mind of God. That’s part of our understanding of God’s nature. He is the originator of all things; the One who has the power and authority to speak things into being out of nothing but his shear creative will. In that sense, the entire world is clearly dependant of God. But just how dependant is it? Absolute dependence implies that the world is ultimately a thought in a corner of God’s mind, and vanishes if he chooses not to think about it. If it is absolutely independent, then it exists whether or not God wants it to. A type of moderate dependance might entail that the world originated from God and requires his continual input and word of authority to have the right to exist, but that he has created it with a kind of built-in object permanence of its own.
Now of course, if God is omniscient, then if he is not cognitively aware of something, it does not exist. But this may be true in one of two ways. The first is that his awareness of say, a banana, is the active cause of the banana’s existence. The second is that the banana’s existence is the active cause of God’s awareness of it. God created bananas, but made them to have an objective existence on their own rather than exist as a figment of his imagination.
As I see it, the trouble with absolute dependence is this: it implies that God is either a sort of magician playing with smoke and mirrors to create the illusion of a real world which really just imaginary, or that he is simply too lazy to create a world with objective existence. When God created the world, he went so far as to call it very good. Would an imaginary world be as good as a real one? In a line of reasoning similar to Anselm’s ontological argument for God’s existence, I might imagine a world that is much better than the real world, but I reason that because it is better, it must be real. That is not to say that everything I imagine must be real, but rather that the things which make it good, if they are really good, must derive from an ultimate reality of goodness. My imaginary world in which all things are as they should be is but an imperfect glimmer of the real world which God made and intended this world to be like. However, supposing that I lived in a colony somewhere in the depths of outer space and had never seen Earth, I might imagine it. In this case, my imagination of earth, if it was accurate to what Earth is really like, would not be as good as the real earth, for the very reason that it would be imagination and not real. Therefore, would not a world in God’s imagination be inferior to a real world which God had created? It seems that it is inherent in God’s infinitely good nature to create worlds that are real rather than simply entertain multiple imaginary figments. After all, one does a greater thing by inventing a car and then building it, than one who simply invents.
The second problem relates to God’s relationship with the characters in his master novel. After all, how can Shakespeare really have a relationship with Hamlet? Hamlet’s choices are free only when one imagines him as a real prince of a real Denmark, as Shakespeare intended his audience to do. As soon as we remember that he is really an imaginary character whose entire existence is confined to script, then any semblance freedom and ability to relate disappears. Now, it might be possible for Shakespeare to become furious with Macbeth and seek to punish him, or to fall in love with Juliet, but we would probably call that schizophrenia. Macbeth may deserve justice within his play, but to call him morally responsible in the same way in which we are, is insane.
The third, and probably greatest problem with God as an imaginative novelist has to do with both humankind and the physical world. If one follows the implications of this system seriously, he arrives at some version of pantheism. If all of creation is simply God’s imaginative activity, than we and the entire universe with us is nothing more than part of the mind of God: part of his very being. This not only destroys the distinction between creator and creation, but also the distinction between good and evil. Our actions, good or otherwise, are nothing but divine fantasies.
I may have a flawed understanding of the claims of this analogy, and of Berkeley’s idealism, I mean, empiricism. But I maintain that as we wait for a better world, a world for which we were created and is more real than we can even imagine, we must know that we too are real: our world, our choices, our relationships. We are made in the image of a real God who desires nothing less.
Of course, most people have difficulty with this idea because it seems to require that we give up on our early-acquired concept of object permanence; the idea that things don’t disappear when we turn our backs to them, and re-appear as soon as we can see them again. Berkeley maintained object permanence by his belief in God. If God is omniscient, seeing everything that exists at all times, then the room doesn’t vanish when we leave it. There is still a mind comprehending it’s existence, along with the existence of everything else in the universe.
This kind of idealism (by implication even though Berkeley was an empiricist), which ascribes ultimate reality to the sphere of the mind and understands physical reality as a kind of illusion or, if you will, a hologram projection of the contents of a supreme mental sphere, sometimes takes the shape of an analogy which is commonly used to help us understand the relationship between God and the world, particularly the relationship between divine predestination and human free will. The analogy is that of God as the author of a supreme narrative, in which human persons are characters. Shakespeare is to Hamlet what God is me. In this way, we can see a way in which human actions can be free and determined at the same time. Shakespeare has imagined and written down what Hamlet will freely choose to do. This is like Berkeley’s idealism in the sense that the world is understood as an emanation of the mind of God. Just as Shakespeare imagined worlds of characters interacting in a story, so God imagined our world and its characters, and imagined it into existence.
But here’s the question: is this a good analogy? In the large scope of things, does it help or hinder our understanding of reality? I am arguing the latter, for several reasons. The first has to do with the nature of the physical world. Of course, the universe and everything in it ultimately has it’s origin in the mind of God. That’s part of our understanding of God’s nature. He is the originator of all things; the One who has the power and authority to speak things into being out of nothing but his shear creative will. In that sense, the entire world is clearly dependant of God. But just how dependant is it? Absolute dependence implies that the world is ultimately a thought in a corner of God’s mind, and vanishes if he chooses not to think about it. If it is absolutely independent, then it exists whether or not God wants it to. A type of moderate dependance might entail that the world originated from God and requires his continual input and word of authority to have the right to exist, but that he has created it with a kind of built-in object permanence of its own.
Now of course, if God is omniscient, then if he is not cognitively aware of something, it does not exist. But this may be true in one of two ways. The first is that his awareness of say, a banana, is the active cause of the banana’s existence. The second is that the banana’s existence is the active cause of God’s awareness of it. God created bananas, but made them to have an objective existence on their own rather than exist as a figment of his imagination.
As I see it, the trouble with absolute dependence is this: it implies that God is either a sort of magician playing with smoke and mirrors to create the illusion of a real world which really just imaginary, or that he is simply too lazy to create a world with objective existence. When God created the world, he went so far as to call it very good. Would an imaginary world be as good as a real one? In a line of reasoning similar to Anselm’s ontological argument for God’s existence, I might imagine a world that is much better than the real world, but I reason that because it is better, it must be real. That is not to say that everything I imagine must be real, but rather that the things which make it good, if they are really good, must derive from an ultimate reality of goodness. My imaginary world in which all things are as they should be is but an imperfect glimmer of the real world which God made and intended this world to be like. However, supposing that I lived in a colony somewhere in the depths of outer space and had never seen Earth, I might imagine it. In this case, my imagination of earth, if it was accurate to what Earth is really like, would not be as good as the real earth, for the very reason that it would be imagination and not real. Therefore, would not a world in God’s imagination be inferior to a real world which God had created? It seems that it is inherent in God’s infinitely good nature to create worlds that are real rather than simply entertain multiple imaginary figments. After all, one does a greater thing by inventing a car and then building it, than one who simply invents.
The second problem relates to God’s relationship with the characters in his master novel. After all, how can Shakespeare really have a relationship with Hamlet? Hamlet’s choices are free only when one imagines him as a real prince of a real Denmark, as Shakespeare intended his audience to do. As soon as we remember that he is really an imaginary character whose entire existence is confined to script, then any semblance freedom and ability to relate disappears. Now, it might be possible for Shakespeare to become furious with Macbeth and seek to punish him, or to fall in love with Juliet, but we would probably call that schizophrenia. Macbeth may deserve justice within his play, but to call him morally responsible in the same way in which we are, is insane.
The third, and probably greatest problem with God as an imaginative novelist has to do with both humankind and the physical world. If one follows the implications of this system seriously, he arrives at some version of pantheism. If all of creation is simply God’s imaginative activity, than we and the entire universe with us is nothing more than part of the mind of God: part of his very being. This not only destroys the distinction between creator and creation, but also the distinction between good and evil. Our actions, good or otherwise, are nothing but divine fantasies.
I may have a flawed understanding of the claims of this analogy, and of Berkeley’s idealism, I mean, empiricism. But I maintain that as we wait for a better world, a world for which we were created and is more real than we can even imagine, we must know that we too are real: our world, our choices, our relationships. We are made in the image of a real God who desires nothing less.
Monday, August 24, 2009
Is Capitalism Christian?
Even those have not given much deliberate thought to the association between Christianity and capitalism have, I expect, been affected by it. Christians are particularly affected, because there is a strong tendancy for groups of believers to polarize around the issue. Some hold strongly to the line that capitalism is the only God-endorsed economic system as the alternitive to Godless, oppressive communism. Others see it as a system which in opposition to the message and spirit of scripture, advocates the oppression of the poor to the benefit of the wealthy. Because Christianity has, in fact, had a traditional association with capitalism, it seems as though many people who doubt capitalism aim their distrust equaly at Christianity, as though it were all part of a vast conspiracy of white, Christian males trying to line their pockets and improve their social position at the expence of disenfranchised minorities. The polarities, of course, then fall along the old line of battle between 'liberal' and 'conservative'.
But in evaulating this connection between Christianity and capitalism (and whether it should even exist) some things need to be said first. It is easy to take a contemporary issue like this, sit down with our Bibles, and figure out which side it advocates. The difficulty with this approach is that Scripture was not written as an answer book for our contemporary problems. All it does, ultimately, is point us toward the solution to our age-old problem; our separation with God. Of course, this brings with it the implications that our world, because it is separated from God, is broken and full of sin, that we were meant for something better, and that there is a way which God wants us to live; a way revealed to us. But as far as my understanding reaches, to treat the Bible as a handbook to economics is to seriously misuse it.
There are, however, some absolute teachings in Scripture about moral principles; about what is good for us as individuals, bodies of believers, and by implication, society. We can know a few things outright. God hates it when the rich and powerful opress the poor and needy. (See the major and minor prophets, the words of Christ, and the book of James.) He also hates it it when civilizations become Gods unto themselves with divine right. (See again, the major prophets and the words against strong and proud empires, and the apocolyptic liturature about what will become of them in the end.) We can therefore conclude from the outset that capitalism is wrong when it leads to the first abuse, and the other extreme, communism is wrong when it leads to the other. History has been a clear witness to both. All we need to do is think about about the things which unchecked industry did to the poor in Britain in the time of Charles Dickens, and about the untold number of nameless graves filled by Joseph Stalin.
Chuck Colson (a Christian capitalist) has noted that capitalism is often defended on pragmatic rather than moral grounds. In other words, many supporters of capitalism seem to acknowledge that capitalism is based on greed, but that it produces a better economic and moral result than the alternatives of socialism or capitalism. Colson, however, goes on to argue that capitalism is an intrinsically moral system, describing how it advocates the values of hard work responsibility, both personal and social. I think that we can agree with this, (I do) but we also need to step back and realize something else before we continue.
As I argued above, scripture does not endorse an economic system. We cannot list in our our history books Communism: Created by Marx next to Capitalism: Created by God. Our world is not the garden of Eden, and whatever God would have put in place there as an economic system we cannot know. While every idea of the human mind has its ultimate source in the mind of a creator who made a world infinitely rich in potential, economic systems are created by people, not by God. And as such, they have the potential to reflect both the image of which he created within us, or the utter depravity of our sinful hearts.
As a result of this, there is trouble whenever people have misplaced trust, not matter what system they advocate. Liberals tend to trust the government with the power to fix our problems. But governments are made up of sinful people who love power and will take atvantage of people if they are able, and who, if they are permitted, become brutal tyrants. Conservatives tend to trust the governed, on whose shoulders the government stands. They don't want tyrannic power; they want to rely on the responsibility of individuals and private institutions. But too often they forget that individuals and the institutions they make up our no more pure than the individuals who govern; they too are inclined toward greed and selfishness. If they are permitted, they will create an anarchy in which right belongs to the one with the most power and the will to use it.
What we are left with, then, is the question of what system tends toward the best outcome and which one promotes better morals. As said above, the extreme of either system can lead to horrific abuse. The founding fathers understood that all humans are fallible and that power must therefore divided, not only between different branches of government, but also between the government and the people. The concept of checks and balances can, I believe, extend to this level. The government should maintain laws to ensure that workers are treated fairly and that coorperations do not have unchecked ability to destroy smaller competitors. But the government also needs to take its constitutional amendments seriously, for these were put into place to protect people from their power. A quotation from the movie V for Vendetta puts it well: "People should not be afraid of their government, governments should be afraid of their people." Their power, in the words of the constitutution, should always be derived from "the consent of the governed."
Conservatives, I think, grasp this better than liberals generally do. In reality, the conservative approach is more balanced than liberalism, which seems to always want to inch toward the extreme of entrusting the government with unchecked power provide for the people as they see fit. But conservatives also must not live in the fairy-tale land where private institutions and individuals will do just what they ought to take care of the poor and the marginalized. I agree that it is they who ought to be doing this, but this side of heaven, they will not do so perfectly. (and nor will anybody else.) Government cannot simply shrug and say "that's not my job; let the lazy bums starve." But neither can any one of us say, "why should I help you? Why should I help myself? Big Brother will feed us."
The economic and political issues of our society are complex. I would be a fool to think that I could offer a simple solution. I don't have an answer. But I do have point: that we should make every thought captive to Christ, and not make Christ the captive of every thought. We should not act as though our perspective was given to us neatly written down by the hand of God, nor sign his name after our words. That being said, we can oppose the idea that the government should become a powerhouse capable of taking away people's money to give to others as only it sees fit, while understanding that it has some obligations toward first, fostering a national ethic of responsibility and charity, and second, providing an example where it must.
But in evaulating this connection between Christianity and capitalism (and whether it should even exist) some things need to be said first. It is easy to take a contemporary issue like this, sit down with our Bibles, and figure out which side it advocates. The difficulty with this approach is that Scripture was not written as an answer book for our contemporary problems. All it does, ultimately, is point us toward the solution to our age-old problem; our separation with God. Of course, this brings with it the implications that our world, because it is separated from God, is broken and full of sin, that we were meant for something better, and that there is a way which God wants us to live; a way revealed to us. But as far as my understanding reaches, to treat the Bible as a handbook to economics is to seriously misuse it.
There are, however, some absolute teachings in Scripture about moral principles; about what is good for us as individuals, bodies of believers, and by implication, society. We can know a few things outright. God hates it when the rich and powerful opress the poor and needy. (See the major and minor prophets, the words of Christ, and the book of James.) He also hates it it when civilizations become Gods unto themselves with divine right. (See again, the major prophets and the words against strong and proud empires, and the apocolyptic liturature about what will become of them in the end.) We can therefore conclude from the outset that capitalism is wrong when it leads to the first abuse, and the other extreme, communism is wrong when it leads to the other. History has been a clear witness to both. All we need to do is think about about the things which unchecked industry did to the poor in Britain in the time of Charles Dickens, and about the untold number of nameless graves filled by Joseph Stalin.
Chuck Colson (a Christian capitalist) has noted that capitalism is often defended on pragmatic rather than moral grounds. In other words, many supporters of capitalism seem to acknowledge that capitalism is based on greed, but that it produces a better economic and moral result than the alternatives of socialism or capitalism. Colson, however, goes on to argue that capitalism is an intrinsically moral system, describing how it advocates the values of hard work responsibility, both personal and social. I think that we can agree with this, (I do) but we also need to step back and realize something else before we continue.
As I argued above, scripture does not endorse an economic system. We cannot list in our our history books Communism: Created by Marx next to Capitalism: Created by God. Our world is not the garden of Eden, and whatever God would have put in place there as an economic system we cannot know. While every idea of the human mind has its ultimate source in the mind of a creator who made a world infinitely rich in potential, economic systems are created by people, not by God. And as such, they have the potential to reflect both the image of which he created within us, or the utter depravity of our sinful hearts.
As a result of this, there is trouble whenever people have misplaced trust, not matter what system they advocate. Liberals tend to trust the government with the power to fix our problems. But governments are made up of sinful people who love power and will take atvantage of people if they are able, and who, if they are permitted, become brutal tyrants. Conservatives tend to trust the governed, on whose shoulders the government stands. They don't want tyrannic power; they want to rely on the responsibility of individuals and private institutions. But too often they forget that individuals and the institutions they make up our no more pure than the individuals who govern; they too are inclined toward greed and selfishness. If they are permitted, they will create an anarchy in which right belongs to the one with the most power and the will to use it.
What we are left with, then, is the question of what system tends toward the best outcome and which one promotes better morals. As said above, the extreme of either system can lead to horrific abuse. The founding fathers understood that all humans are fallible and that power must therefore divided, not only between different branches of government, but also between the government and the people. The concept of checks and balances can, I believe, extend to this level. The government should maintain laws to ensure that workers are treated fairly and that coorperations do not have unchecked ability to destroy smaller competitors. But the government also needs to take its constitutional amendments seriously, for these were put into place to protect people from their power. A quotation from the movie V for Vendetta puts it well: "People should not be afraid of their government, governments should be afraid of their people." Their power, in the words of the constitutution, should always be derived from "the consent of the governed."
Conservatives, I think, grasp this better than liberals generally do. In reality, the conservative approach is more balanced than liberalism, which seems to always want to inch toward the extreme of entrusting the government with unchecked power provide for the people as they see fit. But conservatives also must not live in the fairy-tale land where private institutions and individuals will do just what they ought to take care of the poor and the marginalized. I agree that it is they who ought to be doing this, but this side of heaven, they will not do so perfectly. (and nor will anybody else.) Government cannot simply shrug and say "that's not my job; let the lazy bums starve." But neither can any one of us say, "why should I help you? Why should I help myself? Big Brother will feed us."
The economic and political issues of our society are complex. I would be a fool to think that I could offer a simple solution. I don't have an answer. But I do have point: that we should make every thought captive to Christ, and not make Christ the captive of every thought. We should not act as though our perspective was given to us neatly written down by the hand of God, nor sign his name after our words. That being said, we can oppose the idea that the government should become a powerhouse capable of taking away people's money to give to others as only it sees fit, while understanding that it has some obligations toward first, fostering a national ethic of responsibility and charity, and second, providing an example where it must.
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Does an end justify a means?
Unfortunately, answers to this cornerstone question of ethical thought often take form in the simple polarity of yes and no. While many areas of ethics deserve to be treated as ultimately black and white issues, I maintain that this is not one of them.
To state give my summarized opinion at the outset, I believe that the statement the ends justify the means is false not inherently, but by overgeneralization. Even those who use the phrase as a definitive example of bad ethics probably use the basic principle in many of their own ethical judgements, and rightly so. However, rigid adherence to it would result in generally acknowledged ethical horrors.
For example, suppose that medical science was able to produce a new drug that cured cancer, but happened to be made from turtle shells, and therefore required the harvesting of turtles. Provided that the turtles were killed painlessly and no species were endangered, there would probably be no more objection to the practice than that of butchering beef cattle. However, killing turtles and grinding up their shells as Sunday afternoon hobby would be seen as unethical. Therefore, a practice done without legitimate cause is viewed as wrong, while the same thing, when done as part of lifesaving procedure, is considered ethical. The end justifies the means. However, if our hypothical cancer cure required the slaughter of a few hundred people in order to obtain a substance only found in living brains would be viewed as abominable, even though it would save many more people than it would kill.
Is the moral question then answered merely by the difference in severity between the condition and the treatment? In affirmation of my label for the issue as cornerstone question, it appears as though it is contingent to many different ethical and philosphical issues, such as the the universal versus the individual. Indeed, it has the possibility of becoming deeply complex. However, without succumbing to the temptation to oversimplify an inherently complex question, we also need to recognize that the issue has tremendously practical implications, and we need to be able to make some basic discernments without having to write a philosophical disseratation.
If we are therefore going to attempt to distill the question of wether the end justifies the means to a workable level of simplicity, I have a concept of how I feel it is best to do so.
First of all, in dissagreement with a deonotological view of ethics, which sees the morality of an action being resident merely in the act itself without respect to motives, I cannot help but be compelled by the basic reason underlying the statement that "the end justifies the means." What, after all, does justify an action? I think that there are two basic principles that have bearing on this question. The first is, as alluded above, the intrinsic morality of the act itself. This consideration derives from the understanding of the universe as having an inherently moral character. There is a way things were meant to be. There are physical laws which govern how matter and energy behave, and there are also moral laws which derive a basic value system of good and evil. Murder and rape are bad because they fly in the face of the way that the world was meant to be. Any action can therefore be measured against this cosmic or divine ideal. Outside of any regard of motivation behind an action, the action either conforms to the law of God, or as others would have it, the natural law of universe, or else it does not. Case closed.
The other principle at work is our role as agents capable of action. If we operate off of this principle alone, we arrive at an opposite perspective: that right and wrong are matters of the heart and exist with respect to human free will. This is a kind of foil to the coldness of the first principle; that a man who accidently kills someone is just as guilty as the man who does so intentionally.
What is vital to recognize is that the second principle is impossible to separate from the first. Our role of moral agenthood in the world can only stand upon this same foundation of a moral reality in the universe, which does not merely decree impersonal laws, but is the source of what it means to be human: what we are here for, and therefore, how we should live. This law is not just an impersonal force like gravity, to which we must conform our actions, or else fall to our deaths. It is ultimately to be viewed as something very personal; something to which we ourselves must be conformed, not merely out of brute fear of the consequences, but because conformity to it is the only thing that makes us human, that gives us a sense of purpose, of joy, such that conformity becomes simply a crude, over-technical word for the love in which and for which we were created. Without trying to step upon every stone across the unforgiving river of logic (a task for which I lack time and motivation at present) I will simply give my conclusion from these premises.
Deonotological ethics apply in that anything that happens has a sense of goodness or badness resident in it (although I allow that many happenings can be morally neutral; perhaps I'll stew over that question later.) That goodness or badness has nothing to do with anybody's motives. If a child is run over by a car, it is bad whether or not somebody threw the child's toy's into the street first. More too the point, that occurance is equally contrary to what is good whether or not someone pushed the child or someone tripped the child completely by accident so that they fell into the street. However, the instigator in question has a choice of how much they participate in that tragety. And so do all of us. We have a choice wether we are active causes of evil, or whether we are just a domino that gets knocked over by the next as a consequence to someone else's evil. According to strict deontological ethics, a even hurricane would be culpable for the people it killed. However, common sense tells us that the hurricane is just an impersonal effect resulting in these deaths. The fault lies in whatever (or whoever) brought this world to a fallen state in which things like hurricanes happen. The first principle gives a framework for right and wrong, and the second, the principle of free will, regards how we relate to that framework.
However, this discussion has drifted somewhat from its original aim; to address the question of weather an end justifies the means. In one sense (the sense created by the second principle) the motive( that is, the internal thing) is always that which determine's an agent's moral standing as regards and action. However, this cannot change the rightness or wrongness inherent in the action. I therefore conclude as follows:
An end, in theory justifies the means because we are free moral agents. However, this does not hold true under some circumstances. One is if the end is not a good end at all, in which case the action is clearly wrong altogether. Another is if the means is worse than the ill it is attending heal, which is a clear contradiction within the action. For example, killing people to save them others is a contradition because you are violating a principle (the value of life) in the very attempt to honor it. Often times, using an end to justify a means is truly nothing more than a justification; an excuse to do something we know is wrong but we have convinced ourselves we have the right to do.
Therefore, it is technically correct that an end justifies a means, but we need to treat it more rationally and with the proper caution.
To state give my summarized opinion at the outset, I believe that the statement the ends justify the means is false not inherently, but by overgeneralization. Even those who use the phrase as a definitive example of bad ethics probably use the basic principle in many of their own ethical judgements, and rightly so. However, rigid adherence to it would result in generally acknowledged ethical horrors.
For example, suppose that medical science was able to produce a new drug that cured cancer, but happened to be made from turtle shells, and therefore required the harvesting of turtles. Provided that the turtles were killed painlessly and no species were endangered, there would probably be no more objection to the practice than that of butchering beef cattle. However, killing turtles and grinding up their shells as Sunday afternoon hobby would be seen as unethical. Therefore, a practice done without legitimate cause is viewed as wrong, while the same thing, when done as part of lifesaving procedure, is considered ethical. The end justifies the means. However, if our hypothical cancer cure required the slaughter of a few hundred people in order to obtain a substance only found in living brains would be viewed as abominable, even though it would save many more people than it would kill.
Is the moral question then answered merely by the difference in severity between the condition and the treatment? In affirmation of my label for the issue as cornerstone question, it appears as though it is contingent to many different ethical and philosphical issues, such as the the universal versus the individual. Indeed, it has the possibility of becoming deeply complex. However, without succumbing to the temptation to oversimplify an inherently complex question, we also need to recognize that the issue has tremendously practical implications, and we need to be able to make some basic discernments without having to write a philosophical disseratation.
If we are therefore going to attempt to distill the question of wether the end justifies the means to a workable level of simplicity, I have a concept of how I feel it is best to do so.
First of all, in dissagreement with a deonotological view of ethics, which sees the morality of an action being resident merely in the act itself without respect to motives, I cannot help but be compelled by the basic reason underlying the statement that "the end justifies the means." What, after all, does justify an action? I think that there are two basic principles that have bearing on this question. The first is, as alluded above, the intrinsic morality of the act itself. This consideration derives from the understanding of the universe as having an inherently moral character. There is a way things were meant to be. There are physical laws which govern how matter and energy behave, and there are also moral laws which derive a basic value system of good and evil. Murder and rape are bad because they fly in the face of the way that the world was meant to be. Any action can therefore be measured against this cosmic or divine ideal. Outside of any regard of motivation behind an action, the action either conforms to the law of God, or as others would have it, the natural law of universe, or else it does not. Case closed.
The other principle at work is our role as agents capable of action. If we operate off of this principle alone, we arrive at an opposite perspective: that right and wrong are matters of the heart and exist with respect to human free will. This is a kind of foil to the coldness of the first principle; that a man who accidently kills someone is just as guilty as the man who does so intentionally.
What is vital to recognize is that the second principle is impossible to separate from the first. Our role of moral agenthood in the world can only stand upon this same foundation of a moral reality in the universe, which does not merely decree impersonal laws, but is the source of what it means to be human: what we are here for, and therefore, how we should live. This law is not just an impersonal force like gravity, to which we must conform our actions, or else fall to our deaths. It is ultimately to be viewed as something very personal; something to which we ourselves must be conformed, not merely out of brute fear of the consequences, but because conformity to it is the only thing that makes us human, that gives us a sense of purpose, of joy, such that conformity becomes simply a crude, over-technical word for the love in which and for which we were created. Without trying to step upon every stone across the unforgiving river of logic (a task for which I lack time and motivation at present) I will simply give my conclusion from these premises.
Deonotological ethics apply in that anything that happens has a sense of goodness or badness resident in it (although I allow that many happenings can be morally neutral; perhaps I'll stew over that question later.) That goodness or badness has nothing to do with anybody's motives. If a child is run over by a car, it is bad whether or not somebody threw the child's toy's into the street first. More too the point, that occurance is equally contrary to what is good whether or not someone pushed the child or someone tripped the child completely by accident so that they fell into the street. However, the instigator in question has a choice of how much they participate in that tragety. And so do all of us. We have a choice wether we are active causes of evil, or whether we are just a domino that gets knocked over by the next as a consequence to someone else's evil. According to strict deontological ethics, a even hurricane would be culpable for the people it killed. However, common sense tells us that the hurricane is just an impersonal effect resulting in these deaths. The fault lies in whatever (or whoever) brought this world to a fallen state in which things like hurricanes happen. The first principle gives a framework for right and wrong, and the second, the principle of free will, regards how we relate to that framework.
However, this discussion has drifted somewhat from its original aim; to address the question of weather an end justifies the means. In one sense (the sense created by the second principle) the motive( that is, the internal thing) is always that which determine's an agent's moral standing as regards and action. However, this cannot change the rightness or wrongness inherent in the action. I therefore conclude as follows:
An end, in theory justifies the means because we are free moral agents. However, this does not hold true under some circumstances. One is if the end is not a good end at all, in which case the action is clearly wrong altogether. Another is if the means is worse than the ill it is attending heal, which is a clear contradiction within the action. For example, killing people to save them others is a contradition because you are violating a principle (the value of life) in the very attempt to honor it. Often times, using an end to justify a means is truly nothing more than a justification; an excuse to do something we know is wrong but we have convinced ourselves we have the right to do.
Therefore, it is technically correct that an end justifies a means, but we need to treat it more rationally and with the proper caution.
Monday, September 17, 2007
Miricle Men
One might define a miricle as an event which happens apart from nature. In other words, it is some form of intervention by something that is outside of the closed system of the physical universe. Of course, a complete naturalist does not accept the possibility of miricles under this definition. However, there are probably more believers in miricles than there are believers in God. Every person who believes that he or she has free will (and there are some, although probably few, who do not) believes in miricles.
A false dichotomy is sometimes presented in which events are either determined or random. Free will is often categorized as the latter. But if a choice is random, is it really a choice? Isn't a choice a creation of a personal being?
It is somewhat ironic that many of the people who maintain that miricles do not exist are often the most active in working to manage and protect the environment. They do not recognize the possibility that a personal and rational being can create and interact with our world, while they do this very thing themselves on a smaller scale. Every choice we make is an event outside of nature. We all make miricles.
A false dichotomy is sometimes presented in which events are either determined or random. Free will is often categorized as the latter. But if a choice is random, is it really a choice? Isn't a choice a creation of a personal being?
It is somewhat ironic that many of the people who maintain that miricles do not exist are often the most active in working to manage and protect the environment. They do not recognize the possibility that a personal and rational being can create and interact with our world, while they do this very thing themselves on a smaller scale. Every choice we make is an event outside of nature. We all make miricles.
Monday, September 03, 2007
Argument from meaning
Every so often, an idea occurs to me which seems somewhat trite, but at the same time interesting enough that I feel some compulsion to put it down in words.
This one actually occured to me, if I recall correctly, in science class. I was thinking about about materialism, and about how it starts with pure impiricism, and draws only conclusions that can be reached by sheer impiricism. I have thought about this in the past in light of the epistemological short-sightedness of this methedology, and have picked the idea apart from the ground up. But why not approach it from the top down?
To start with, it might be speculated that any worldview (even nihilism) presupposes some kind of meaning. This can be held on the very personal grounds that nobody who completely lacked a concept of meaning and a desire to fullfill it would ever bother postulating an idea of any sort. Meaning is a psychological prerequisite to any kind of activity. Even those who are skepical of it's existence, find meaning in their self-appointed task of sharing their message of its non-existence with the world.
My basic question, however, is whether it makes as much sense to start with the apparently necessary assumption of meaning, as it does to start with the assumption that only the impirically observable exists. Although this statement will inevitbably be called such names as unscientific, I do not see where it is so fundamentally different from drawing conclusions from other seemingly undeniable aspects of human experience. We might state this proposition syllogistically as follows:
1. Raw matter cannot produce meaning.
2. Humans experience meaning.
3. Therefore, there is more than raw matter.
Of course, it is another matter to get from this to the idea of a God, let alone the God of Christianity. In fact, pantheists have reasonable, if skewed, grounds for explaining meaning. That view has a different set of problems.
This one actually occured to me, if I recall correctly, in science class. I was thinking about about materialism, and about how it starts with pure impiricism, and draws only conclusions that can be reached by sheer impiricism. I have thought about this in the past in light of the epistemological short-sightedness of this methedology, and have picked the idea apart from the ground up. But why not approach it from the top down?
To start with, it might be speculated that any worldview (even nihilism) presupposes some kind of meaning. This can be held on the very personal grounds that nobody who completely lacked a concept of meaning and a desire to fullfill it would ever bother postulating an idea of any sort. Meaning is a psychological prerequisite to any kind of activity. Even those who are skepical of it's existence, find meaning in their self-appointed task of sharing their message of its non-existence with the world.
My basic question, however, is whether it makes as much sense to start with the apparently necessary assumption of meaning, as it does to start with the assumption that only the impirically observable exists. Although this statement will inevitbably be called such names as unscientific, I do not see where it is so fundamentally different from drawing conclusions from other seemingly undeniable aspects of human experience. We might state this proposition syllogistically as follows:
1. Raw matter cannot produce meaning.
2. Humans experience meaning.
3. Therefore, there is more than raw matter.
Of course, it is another matter to get from this to the idea of a God, let alone the God of Christianity. In fact, pantheists have reasonable, if skewed, grounds for explaining meaning. That view has a different set of problems.
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