This is a continuation of my response to I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist by Norm Geisler and Frank Turek. Though fifteen years old, this book continues to be a bestseller in the category of Christian apologetics. Part 1 of the critique is here.

Morality (Mother Teresa isn’t a good example)

Geisler and Turek (GT) spend 25 pages giving their argument for a divine source for morality. I’ve written a lot about the weak Christian justification for morality before (some of those posts are listed below), but this is the most thorough version of the Christian argument to which I’ve responded.

That doesn’t mean that it’s well thought out. The chapter is titled, “Mother Teresa vs. Hitler,” and we’re already off to a bad start. Mother Teresa isn’t the saint that GT imagine (well, okay, literally, she is). She has received much criticism. She was little concerned about healing her patients or even preventing their pain. She saw her patients’ suffering as a moral crucible and said, “There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s Passion. The world gains much from their suffering.” The goal of modern medicine is precisely the opposite—not to celebrate suffering and disease but to fight it.

GT’s moral arguments are shallow, and the same few mistakes are made repeatedly. I’ll give a fair amount of the argument rather than simplifying it, in the hope that this prepares you for similar arguments. Their argument is aimed at the choir. The thinking is confused and sloppy and at best is a pat on the head to assure Christians that they’ve backed the right horse.

The Moral Argument

At this point in the book, GT have given us their Cosmological and Teleological arguments. Their third is the Moral Law argument:

1. Every law has a law giver

2. There is a Moral Law

3. Therefore, there is a Moral Law Giver (page 171)

Newton’s Second Law of Motion (f = ma) is also a law. Must there be a physics law giver? GT will say yes, but we need evidence. With GT, we rarely go beyond an intuitive, kinda-feels-right type of argument, but I suppose that works well with their target audience.

One definition of objective morality . . .

The theme running through this argument is a Moral Law that mimics the Greek god Proteus, changing shape whenever we grab it. The Moral Law is a claim of objective morality, but “objective morality” is never clearly defined. Let’s start with William Lane Craig’s definition of objective morality: “moral values that are valid and binding whether anybody believes in them or not.”

And let me define my opposing hypothesis, the natural morality position. Morality comes from two places. Our programming (from evolution) explains the traits that are largely common across all societies such as the Golden Rule. We’re all the same species, so it’s not surprising that we respond in similar ways to moral challenges. Our customs (from society) explain society-specific attitudes to issues like capital punishment, sex, blasphemy, honor, and so on. I will argue here that natural morality explains what we see better than GT’s Moral Law hypothesis.

More from GT:

Without an objective standard of meaning and morality, then life is meaningless and there’s nothing absolutely right or wrong. Everything is merely a matter of opinion. (171)

Bullshit. Look up “meaning” and “morality” in the dictionary, and you will find no mention of an objective standard. Our colloquial uses of meaning and morality work just fine in supporting a meaningful life. GT denigrate our human evaluation of morality as “merely” opinion, but I await evidence that Christians do things differently. It’s easy to appeal to an objective standard; the hard part is showing that that standard actually exists.

. . . but wait! There are more!

GT don’t feel obliged to stick with just one definition of objective morality.

When we say the Moral Law exists, we mean that all people are impressed with a fundamental sense of right and wrong. (171)

Redefinition! Now the Moral Law is that which we all feel. I suppose this is an appeal to our moral conscience? The focus is now on people, while William Lane Craig’s definition was on a morality grounded outside people.

Everyone knows there are absolute moral obligations. An absolute moral obligation is something that is binding on all people, at all times, in all places. And an absolute Moral Law implies an absolute Moral Law Giver. (171)

How about “slavery is wrong”? Is that binding on all people, at all times, in all places? I wonder why we didn’t get that from God and, indeed, got the opposite. Apparently in God’s youth, coveting needed prohibiting but not slavery.

Let me invent a term that will get some use as we go through this chapter: the Assumed Objectivity Fallacy. GT declares, “Everyone knows there are absolute moral obligations”? Wrong—the Assumed Objectivity Fallacy is either assuming without evidence that objective morals exist or assuming that everyone knows and accepts objective morality.

Back to GT:

This does not mean that every moral issue has easily recognizable answers. (171)

Redefinition! Now the Moral Law is something that we only dimly feel. The Moral Law is binding on all people . . . but we don’t really know for sure what the Moral Law is saying at every moral fork in the road. That seems unfair—to be bound by a law that we don’t understand—but I suppose GT’s god works in mysterious ways.

The challenge I like to give any believer in objective morality is to take some moral issue of the day—abortion, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, capital punishment—and give us a resolution of the issue that is (1) objectively correct and that (2) everyone can see is correct. Like GT, they justify neither the claim that it exists nor that this Moral Law is reliably accessible. I wonder then, what good is it?

GT’s childlike idea that our morality is objective isn’t supported by the dictionary or everyday experience. Being a grownup is apparently easier for some of us than others.

Continue with part 2.

Other posts responding to Christian views of morality:

• Explanation for Objective Morality? Another Fail.
• Morality’s Ruby Slippers
• Bad Atheist Arguments: “Morality Doesn’t Come From God”
• Frank Turek’s Criminally Bad C.R.I.M.E.S. Argument: Morality
• C. S. Lewis Gets Morality Wrong

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 9/17/15.)

Image from thierry ehrmann, CC license

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You know when you’re at the coffee shop and ask for the bathroom key, how it comes attached to a huge soup ladle or block of wood? Why would an ordinary key need an enormous, clunky keychain?

It’s so you don’t put it in your pocket or purse and forget to return it.

This idea of mistake-proofing has been around for 60 years within Japanese manufacturing, where it’s called poka-yoke. We can apply this idea to Christian morality, where it’s glaringly absent.

How poka-yoke works

Suppose you’re on an assembly line, manually putting keyboards together. There are 101 keys on a standard keyboard, and each one needs a spring. Take a spring, put it in a keycap, and pop it into the keyboard. Then repeat, over and over. It’s neither a difficult nor an error-prone process, but if you forget a spring for just one keycap out of a thousand, that’s 10% of your keyboards that are broken.

Solution: use a scale to weigh out 101 springs. If you’re done with a keyboard but there are springs left over, you know immediately that you’ve made a mistake. That keyboard gets fixed.

• Consider the home thermostat. Industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss noticed that the traditional rectangular thermostat was often mounted not perfectly level. And there it would sit on the wall for all to see for decades, crooked. Solution: the iconic round thermostat, which can’t be crooked.
• Consider laying glue for floor tiles. It takes experience to know just how much glue to apply. Solution: a trowel with a serrated edge applies just the right amount.
• Consider the (now obsolete) 3.5-inch floppy disk. When inserting it into the drive, there are four edges to stick in first, and you can turn it upside down to get four more ways. That’s seven ways to do it wrong, except that it only goes in one way. You simply can’t put it in wrong. Punch cards (even more obsolete) have a similar problem—what if one of the cards in the stack is upside down or backwards? With the top-left corner cut off, any deviant is obvious.

Morality according to Epicurus

In the Christian story, God places moral requirements on humans, but he doesn’t give them sufficient tools to get there. Rewarding people for being good is what the other religions do, and Christians learn that their own pathetic efforts at moral perfection are insufficient. If they want what Christianity offers, they must get there by faith.

God could’ve made us morally perfect. Or given humans the wisdom to navigate life in a morally perfect way. Or just forgiven our moral errors (like we do).

Apparently, none of those options caught on as God evolved over the centuries. Instead, God is like an evil scientist who puts mice in a maze and delivers, not cheese or a mild shock, but eternal bliss or torment.

Consider the famous critique of the Problem of Evil from third-century BCE Greek philosopher Epicurus.

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then why is there evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

Epicurus takes a common-sense approach to God and morality. If God exists, he would give us the tools to reach any goal he might reasonably assign. Is moral perfection a goal? That’s not a problem with perfect wisdom. With perfect wisdom, you could choose to do evil, but who would want to when the morally perfect route is both obvious and compelling? The sensible god of Epicurus would’ve given us that. If we can make things foolproof (like a ladle as a keychain), so can God, and if God created morality, he would’ve made it foolproof. (More on morality here and here.)

The Christian response is that we are fallible people with imperfect brains and incomplete knowledge. Who are we to judge God? But this is the Hypothetical God fallacy, which assumes God first and then decides how we must respond. This is backwards. Instead, we look at the evidence and ask ourselves if God even exists.

It’s not looking good.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/13/15.)

Image from Paul VanDerWerf, CC license

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Christopher Hitchens (1949 – 2011), a well-known atheist orator, had a moral challenge for Christians: identify a moral action taken or a moral sentiment uttered by a believer that couldn’t be taken or uttered by a nonbeliever—something that only a believer could do and an atheist couldn’t. He said that he had been given no credible answer.

Amy Hall from Stand to Reason (Greg Koukl’s ministry) thinks she is up to the challenge. Let’s take a look.

1. Hitchens misunderstands the theist’s point

[Hitchens thinks the Christian is saying] that without God, we couldn’t know right from wrong, when the actual objection is that there wouldn’t be any right or wrong

Where’s the problem? As I read Hitchens, he was responding to the assumption that being a Christian provided some moral advantage. (And, according to Christianity, it does: “We know that anyone born of God does not continue to sin” (1 John 5:18).)

And if you want to argue that morality exists only because God put it there, that needs some evidence. You’ve provided none (more on Christians’ inability to defend objective morality here).

2. The Challenge is unanswerable

This is a clever observation: if Hitchens the atheist is the judge of the Hitchens Challenge, the Christian can’t win because he decides what is moral.

There might be certain acts that only theists would recognize as being moral. Atheists, not recognizing those acts as being good, would not attempt to do them as moral acts.

The first problem is that this undercuts another popular Christian apologetic argument. What’s wrong with Hitchens as judge—don’t you say that morality is objective? If morality is objective (defined by apologist William Lane Craig as “moral values that are valid and binding whether anybody believes in them or not”) and we humans can reliably access those values, Hitchens or any honest atheist would be as good a judge as anyone.

Since it is logically impossible to give an answer that will satisfy Hitchens, he may as well ask us to draw him a square circle and then declare himself the winner when we fail. In the end, his challenge is nothing but a rhetorical trick, and it should be exposed and dismissed as such. Hitchens should never get away with even asking it, let alone demanding we give him an “acceptable” answer in order to defend theism.

I’m reminded of the lawyer’s maxim, “When the facts are on your side, pound the facts. When the law is on your side, pound the law. When neither is on your side, pound the table.” There’s a lot of table pounding here along with the demand that the Challenge be dismissed as inadmissible.

The resolution is simple: insist that objective, unbiased third parties must judge this Challenge. Easy.

As it happens, there is an answer to Hitchens’s question—one that seemed obvious to me immediately—and it illustrates perfectly the problem with the challenge. The highest moral good a person can do is to worship the living, true, sovereign God—to love Him with all one’s heart, soul, mind, and strength. Not only will no atheist ever do this, no atheist can do this.

That’s the pinnacle of morality? It’s an odd definition of morality that has nothing to do with doing good to living beings, but I guess Christians can define their dogma as they choose. And that’s the point: this is dogma specific to Christians. Our objective, unbiased third party judges would reject this. (More on how praise applied to God makes no sense here.)

Now it looks like it’s you who’s playing the rhetorical trick.

Let’s return to the Challenge. Hitchens is simply saying that Christians can claim no moral high ground over atheists and that Christianity brings nothing moral to the table that wasn’t already part of social interaction. God pretends to generously gives morality to humans, but it was theirs all along, like Dorothy’s ruby slippers.

Concluded with one more Christian response in part 2.

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Image from mari lezhava, CC license
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God allows suffering, but it would be morally wrong for that suffering to be justified in any way except that it benefit the sufferer. The common excuse made for God is that suffering can be for the greater good, but that kind of suffering is exploitative and immoral. That means that suffering is a good thing, and we would be immoral if we tried to stop it.

Said another way, conventional morality is possible only with atheism.

These are the surprising conclusions from the argument in “Atheism and the Basis of Morality” by Stephen Maitzen (2013). I’ve distilled the argument here.

To see how the conclusions are supported, I want to make the argument as transparent as possible, so I’ve added a bit of formality and labeled the steps.

The argument

Here are some axioms (statements taken to be true without proof) to help us start on the same page.

Axiom 1: For simplicity and to avoid disagreement, “ordinary morality” has been distilled down to “we have the moral obligation to prevent easily preventable extreme suffering by a child.” That’s it.

Now, some basic assumptions about God’s properties.

Axiom 2: God

(a) is aware of all human suffering,

(b) knows how to prevent that suffering,

(c) has the ability to prevent the suffering,

(d) can do anything logically possible (indeed, is unlimited in knowledge and power),

(e) knows if suffering is necessary for the well-being of the sufferer, and

(f) won’t do anything morally imperfect.

And here’s the moral problem we need to wrestle with. How we should respond is the focus of the argument.

Axiom 3: There is, right now, a child experiencing terrible suffering.

God knows about the suffering child (Axiom 2a); nevertheless, he’s allowing the suffering to continue. Let’s understand God’s attitude toward that suffering by considering the following supposition.

Supposition 1: God allows the suffering to continue because it will ultimately benefit the child.

If Supposition S1 is false, then it’s not the case that the suffering will ultimately benefit the child—maybe it will benefit others or maybe there’s no reason at all. I will show that S1 must be true.

Axiom 4: A morally perfect being can’t act immorally.

Corollary 4: From Axiom 4, a morally perfect being can’t have the excuse, “My action was immoral, but that’s okay because it was the lesser of two evils.” Said another way, a morally perfect being can’t face a moral dilemma.

Since God never has moral dilemmas (Corollary 4), he never says, “Gee, I hate to see that kid in pain, but it’s for the greater good.”

Therefore, God can’t exploit people (that is, use them for some purpose other than to help them).

Therefore, S1 must be true, and any suffering allowed by God must be for that person’s benefit (like the pain from a vaccination) and not justified because it’s for someone else’s benefit (for the greater good).

Objections

Let’s pause for a moment and consider a couple of objections. The first objection says that exploiting people can’t be a problem because we do it ourselves. An example would be quarantining someone with a contagious illness, where we’re making one innocent person suffer for the benefit of others.

Response: Yes, we do exploit people that way, but that’s only because we’re not omnipotent. God is (Axiom 2b). We have an excuse for exploiting people, but God doesn’t.

Here’s another objection: maybe God could compensate sufferers materially even if the suffering wasn’t required for their benefit. How many years of life in Paradise would it take to overshadow a poor life on earth, no matter how miserable?

Response: No, compensation is not justification. If I punch you but them immediately apologize and give you a million dollars, my action was still morally wrong. You’ve been amply compensated, but that doesn’t justify my action (thinking otherwise is stupid Christian argument #25a.) Remember, the kind of non-exploitative harm we’re talking about is unavoidable suffering for that person’s own benefit, like jabbing a kid with a needle (suffering) to deliver a vaccine (the justifiable good).

Conclusion

From that groundwork, we can reap a few startling conclusions.

Given that there are suffering children (A3), how do we respond? “We have the moral obligation to prevent easily preventable extreme suffering by a child” (A1). But God ensures that any suffering is neither gratuitous nor exploitative but is for that person’s benefit (S1).

Therefore, it’s bad to stop suffering (from S1).

Therefore A1 is false since it contradicts S1.

Therefore, our moral duty to help suffering children (A1) vanishes. In fact, it’s more than that: getting in the way of someone’s suffering is getting in the way of their moral medicine. Mother Teresa’s crazy medieval zealotry actually fits in fairly well with this thinking: “There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s Passion. The world gains much from their suffering.”

We’ve seen this before. Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rod was criticized for messing with the natural order. If God decided that a building needed to be struck with lightning, who was Franklin to say otherwise (more)?

Seen another way, our moral instincts are backwards: the worse the suffering, the more obvious that it’s for that person’s benefit and not just a trivial bump in the road of life, and we should leave it alone to avoid messing with God’s plan. (One wonders how it could be so easy for us to overturn God’s plan, but that’s a tangent.)

So where does this leave morality? If our most fundamental moral axiom—that we should prevent the suffering of children if easily done—is gone because suffering must be a good thing, what’s left? What sense is a prohibition against lying or theft when an intuitively more fundamental axiom is gone? Can this morality be salvaged despite its gaping hole?

But drop the theistic assumptions, and Axiom A1 is back in force, and ordinary morality works just like everyone intuitively thinks it should. Atheism, not theism, is compatible with morality.

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Image by Claudia on Unsplash
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This is a guest post by Richard S. Russell. Richard is a retired research analyst (Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction) and long-time activist in the realms of atheism, science fiction, and liberal politics. He has more opinions than any ten people should legally be allowed to have but makes up for it by giving them away as fast as possible. He blogs irregularly at richardsrussell.blogspot.com.

The recent news stories about sexual predators like Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, and Harvey Weinstein have given rise to widespread puzzlement over how so many people who knew what was going on could have remained silent about it for so long.

Silence in the face of wrongdoing is hardly a new phenomenon. Jews refer to the “silence of the world” as the Nazis launched their genocidal death camps. (Martin Niemöller famously wrote about how he “did not speak out” as one group after another was targeted for oblivion.) The gay-rights group ACT UP likewise pointed out that “silence = death” in the 1980s, and Audre Lorde affirmed that Your Silence Will Not Protect You, as it had not protected black people or women.

It is well past time to break a similar silence by calling a spade a spade in an area where few dare to tread: the Roman Catholic Church, with its centuries-long record of being a force for bad, is one of the most evil institutions on Earth!

But let’s not dwell on the past, with its multiple Crusades, centuries-long Inquisition, pogroms, literal witch hunts, torching of astronomers as part of its general anti-intellectualism, the Reichskonkordat that enabled Nazi Germany to pursue its atrocities with zero moral outrage from Rome, and so on. What have you done to us lately?

Well, like the chronic drunk who used to get blotto, start fights, and bust up the bar, only to be hauled off to the slammer, the Catholic Church has learned not to be so blatant in its irresponsibility. Instead, it goes home and more surreptitiously (and safely) takes out its frustrated machismo on the wife and kids. Especially the kids.

The priesthood’s rampant pederasty and its subsequent coverup by church hierarchy got all the headlines in the United States and was the subject of the Oscar-winning 2015 film Spotlight. More recently similar abuses have come to light in Australia.

But abuses caused by Catholicism’s perfervid obsession with human sexuality don’t stop there. There’s the enforced peonage of unwed mothers in Ireland, rampant AIDS in Africa because of Catholicism’s irrational and irresponsible opposition to condoms, and the pervasive squalor and misery of the poverty-stricken barrios and favelas in Latin America due to gross overpopulation.

Money, misery, and misogyny also loom large in the Catholic scale of values, with baby sales in Spain, money laundering via the Vatican Bank, fawning adulation of Mother Teresa for her contemptible advocacy of poverty and suffering as the surest path to their imaginary paradise, and general denigration of women as not fully human.

And, with particular irony, the Catholic Church’s official position on the active role of Satan in worldly affairs makes it America’s foremost proponent of Satanism, the better to strike fear into the hearts of its gullible followers. (As Eric Hoffer remarked in The True Believer, “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.”)

Of the two great evil, corrupt, greedy, misogynistic, authoritarian, dehumanizing organizations that have spread their tentacles from Italy over the rest of civilization, why is it that only the less pernicious one, the Mafia, has the bad reputation?

This is not a rhetorical question, nor is the comparison inappropriate. The Mafia engages in things like protection rackets, promising to keep small merchants safe from imaginary dangers if they just shell out the weekly pizzo to the local goomba. For this the mafiosi are subject to prosecution in the U.S. under the RICO (Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations) Act.

But in America, where the First Amendment provides great protection and latitude for religious groups, the Catholic Church can do essentially the same thing just by waving around its “Get Out of Jail Free” card. And the beauty part is that they don’t have to be bothered with occasionally delivering on the threat of disaster, since all of their foreboding consequences happen off stage.

Furthermore, the Catholic Church has a large presence in America, with concomitant political influence. It can get away with abuses here at home that, had they been perpetrated by religious groups like ISIS or Al-Qaeda abroad, would have generated a cacophony of loud, angry voices calling for immediate, violent retribution. Easy enough to talk big and nasty about guys halfway around the world, whom nobody here knows personally, but nobody’s about to advocate bombing Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City.

Now this essay is the sort of “emperor has no clothes” story that regularly brings prompt and indignant accusations of anti-Catholicism from the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. And it’s possible that this one will do the same as well. But let’s be clear right up front about the ole switcheroo that the Catholic League regularly tries to pull in these matters. They’ll take legitimate criticism of the church as an institution and try to twist it into seeming like irrational bigotry against individual parishioners as people.

In fairness, it isn’t as if there was never a need for an outfit like this. Anti-Catholicism was once rife in America. It was never as awful as racism, or as widespread as sexism under color of law, or as virulent as anti-Semitism, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t a serious problem, perhaps never more so than in the Philadelphia nativist riots of 1844. In fact, so bad was the insistence on Protestant prayer and readings from Protestant Bibles in the public-school classrooms that the Catholic Church felt compelled to start up its own parallel system of parochial schools.

There were economic consequences as well. Throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th, employers posting the chauvinistic caveat “no Irish need apply” seemed on the surface to be engaging in discrimination based “merely” on national origin, but underlying that veneer was a strong streak of religious prejudice, as Poles and Italians likewise discovered (except without the catchy faux-polite slogan).

But that was then, this is now. A series of Supreme Court decisions, from Everson v. Board of Education in 1947 through Wallace v. Jaffree in 1985, effectively required schools, as agents of government, to get out of the religion business (as the First Amendment had theoretically required at least since the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868). And the Civil Rights Act of 1964 explicitly forbade discrimination on the basis of religion or national origin and set up the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to enforce it.

So authentic complaints that individual Catholics were being discriminated against had largely faded away toward the end of the 20th century. And it’s been getting even better since then. A recent study by the Pew Research Center showed that Catholics are the second most favorably viewed religious group in the US, just a tick below (believe it or not) Jews! (Atheists were well down the scale, just a couple of notches above Muslims.)

So there might well have been some justification for a group like the Catholic League back in 1844. But it was founded in 1973.

Why? Well, like the flag-waving super-patriots who claim to be pro-military but really just favor showering gargantuan amounts of cash on military contractors while screwing the troops, the veterans, and their dependents, so too does the Catholic League serve as a sycophantic apologist for the wealthy and powerful church hierarchy while turning a blind eye to what it’s doing to the common people in the pews.

And nothing fires up its fervor like challenges to parochial schools, whose whole ostensible raison d’être was largely obviated by the now decades-old religious neutrality of the public schools. But parochial schools had demonstrated their worth independently of freedom from discrimination: They had proven to be excellent indoctrination centers. And they’d be even more valuable if they could only gain access to some of those sweet, sweet public-tax dollars, thank you so very much. So: no better way to gain public sympathy and support than to play the victim card, over and over again, as loudly as possible.

Alarmingly, it may be about to get worse. Congress appears poised to repeal the Johnson Amendment, named for then-Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, who insisted that churches, in return for their tax exemptions, had to abstain from politicking. If you think that superPACs are a blight on democracy now, imagine what one would be like if it were being run by an institution which is the very antithesis of democratic—authoritarian and dogmatic from top to bottom!

But, once again, let’s be clear here. My beef is with the corrupt institutional church itself. I’ve got nothing against human beings who happen to be Catholic. Quite the opposite, in fact. They’re not the ones who are running the scam, they’re the dupes, the suckers who fell for it. They’re not the perpetrators, they’re the victims. As such, they deserve our understanding and pity. (Somewhat mitigating that sympathy is that some of them are also enablers, like the owner of that bodega who just quietly pays his baksheesh to the mob and never complains to the cops.)

Most importantly, individual Catholics are witnesses! They are closer to the nefarious doings of the Catholic Church than anyone else, and they are in a unique position to be able to step forward and denounce them. If only they would. If only they were not afraid. If only they were not cowed. If only they were not humbly submissive.

If only they were not silent.

To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous
as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin.
— Cardinal Bellarmine,
during the trial of Galileo, 1615

Image credit: Friendly Atheist

Avoiding sex before marriage isn’t much of a problem in a society where people get married shortly after they become sexually mature. Unfortunately, the West isn’t such a society. Take a look at how things have changed.

Medieval marriage

Centuries ago, first marriages in Europe were typically at 25 years, with brides a couple of years younger than grooms. Yes, Shakespeare portrays Juliet as only 13, but that was uncommon. Noble folk typically married earlier, but Juliet would’ve been young even for a noblewoman.

Onset of puberty in the 1800s was about 16–17 for girls and a year later for boys, with sexual maturity requiring another five years.

This meant that young people typically had just a few years between sexual maturity and marriage. Even so, premarital sex was common (though out-of-wedlock births were frowned upon). Until the mid-1700s in Britain, betrothed couples could live together and have sex, and pregnant brides were common and accepted. Customs in Colonial America were about the same, and a third of New England brides were pregnant.

Marriage today

The average age at first marriage in the U.S. is now 27 for women and 29 for men, a bit older than centuries earlier. The bigger difference is the age of sexual maturity. Onset of puberty is now 10–11 for girls and a year later for boys. The process is complete about five years later.

While the cause of this change in puberty is debated—some combination of improved nutrition and hormone-like chemicals in our environment?—this means an average of over a decade of sexual maturity before marriage. Abstinence before marriage is now much more of a trial.

What does the Bible say?

The Bible has a lot to say about sex. It talks about a girl who is presented as a virgin but isn’t. It talks about adultery. It talks about when rape is okay. It talks about how to take captured women as wives. It talks about which relatives you may not sleep with. It even talks about which relatives you must sleep with. (More on the Bible’s crazy marriage and sex customs here.)

The Bible also has plenty to say about premarital sex. Or nothing, depending on your interpretation. The issue revolves around the Greek word porneia.

The New Testament uses this word a lot. It’s clearly a bad thing, but it’s not clear exactly what it means. It’s often translated as “fornication,” which is consensual sex between two persons not married to each other. That includes premarital sex, so the Bible prohibition appears to be clear.

But explore other translations, and the issue is trickier. Some define the word as “prostitution,” because the Septuagint (the Greek Old Testament) used it this way.

A popular translation is “sexual immorality,” though this ambiguous. Even if the sins in this category were clear in Paul’s mind, they’re not clear in ours, and we are only projecting our own biases when listing what this prohibition must mean. No, “sexual immorality” doesn’t clearly prohibit premarital sex, and it’s not included in the long list of sexual sins in Leviticus 18 and 20.

Even if premarital sex were prohibited in the Bible, so what? The Bible celebrates genocide, polygamy, and slavery, and yet we reject them. You might say that God was bound by the customs of the time, and that’s why they’re allowed. But no matter—they’re not allowed today. Similarly, if a ban on premarital sex makes no sense for modern society, drop it.

The Christian response

One approach, often adopted by conservative Christians, is to get married early. You want sex? Fair enough—just get married first. But a rush to marriage driven by a desire for sex can make for a poorly grounded marriage. A Barna study came to similar conclusions as earlier studies when it concluded, “divorce rates are higher among people who are members of conservative Protestant faiths,” and “divorce rates were lower for people who described themselves as atheist or agnostic.”

Just as sex-driven marriage isn’t the best approach, neither is abstinence-only sex education. More knowledge leads to less risky sexual behavior. Not teaching safe sex or discouraging teens from the HPV vaccine is like banning fire extinguishers because otherwise everyone will set things on fire.

Another approach

Let me propose a different approach. Nature will give adult bodies to teens whether we like it or not. We don’t give them the keys to the car without driver’s education, so give them the owner’s manual to go along with their adult bodies as well (more).

Instead of a one-size-fits-all demand that premarital sex be off limits, society should (1) provide sex education that minimizes unwanted pregnancy and STDs, (2) make contraception and condoms easily available, (3) emphasize that “No” means no in a relationship, and (4) teach that sex alters a relationship and shouldn’t be treated lightly. Finally, have abortion available as a backstop.

Yes, there can be harm with sex, but there can be harm with cars and the internet, too. Sexual compatibility is an important component of a strong marriage. Should the couple figure that out before or after committing their lives to each other?

The gap between sexual maturity and marriage has gone from a couple of years to more than a decade. The ban on premarital sex is naive, especially when it’s just a tradition and isn’t in the Bible. This is like female genital mutilation in predominantly Muslim societies—it’s only a tradition, and it’s not in the Quran.

There’s nothing inherently harmful in premarital sex, and the sin of premarital sex is one of those rare problems that you can simply define away.

We are living at a time where some people . . .
want to test whether the milk is good before they buy the cow.
— John Sentamu, Archbishop of York
(commenting on the decision of Prince William and Kate Middleton
to live together before their wedding)

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 12/23/13.)

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