Kreeft’s Argument from Absolute Conscience Fails Absolutely

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Philosopher Peter Kreeft says that his Argument from Conscience (PDF) is one of only two arguments for the existence of God in the Bible. Its biblical pedigree doesn’t do it any favors, however, and it fares no better than the rest.

Kreeft summarizes the argument:

The simple, intuitive point of the argument from conscience is that everyone in the world knows, deep down, that he is absolutely obligated to be and do good, and this absolute obligation could come only from God. Thus everyone knows God, however obscurely, by this moral intuition, which we usually call conscience. Conscience is the voice of God in the soul.

Kreeft defines conscience as “the knowledge of my absolute obligation to goodness.”

Absolute obligation? Where did this come from? That’s not how I define the word, nor is it how the dictionary defines it. This qualifier exists only in Kreeft’s definition.

The bad people

What does Kreeft do with people like me who aren’t on board? He puts us into two bins: (1) those who have no conscience or a defective conscience and (2) those who know the truth of Kreeft’s words but repress this knowledge.

And what about the third bin, those who see obligation but not absolute obligation? There is no third bin. Kreeft says these people actually understand God’s will because the Bible says so. You know the kind—those people “who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them” (Rom. 1:18–19).

(Is it just me or does it seem circular to assume the existence of God in an argument about the existence of God? And is it just me or have I been labeled as someone “who suppresses the truth by their wickedness”?)

He continues with the assumption of absoluteness and says that one’s conscience has absolute moral authority. I appreciate that I’m compelled to listen to my conscience, but (again) where does the absoluteness come in?

Maybe we’re defining things differently. To me, an absolute obligation isn’t simply an important or strongly felt obligation. The key is its grounding. It’s more than grounded within me (such as, “it’s just wrong to chew with your mouth open”). It’s more than grounded within society (such as, “it’s illegal to pass a stop sign in a car without stopping completely”). It’s grounded in an absolute way that transcends both me and society.

I see no evidence that one’s conscience is an absolute moral authority. Kreeft provides none and simply asserts the claim.

Source of morals

Back to Kreeft’s argument, quoted in summary above. He imagines that he’s firmly established that the conscience is an absolute moral authority and moves on to the second premise: “the only possible source of absolute authority is an absolutely perfect will, a divine being.” But since he’s given no reason to imagine that the absolute authority he refers to exists, he has no argument.

Given the imagined absolute conscience, can ordinary people reliably access its absolute truth? Kreeft admits that they can’t but says that God has “revealed to us clear moral maps (Scripture and Church).” If our conscience tells us to reject these maps, that’s the indication of a faulty conscience.

Hold on—scripture and church are “clear moral maps”?

Nonsense. The Christian church is dividing faster than amoebas. There are now 42,000 denominations of Christianity and counting. Which one(s) are correct? Christians can’t even decide among themselves.

And let’s check the hypothesis that scripture is a clear moral map. Are Christians of a unified voice on the topic of abortion? Same-sex marriage? Euthanasia? Stem-cell research? Capital punishment? The use of torture? Any divisive social issue? Scripture is a sock puppet that you can make say just about anything you want, and Christians on all sides of these issues do just that.

I see two possibilities: (1) absolute morality exists though we can’t reliably access it or (2) there is no absolute morality but we have a shared (and imperfect) moral instinct. Kreeft’s argument has done nothing to justify the supernatural explanation. I recommend the natural one.

Secular schools can never be tolerated 
because such schools have no religious instruction, 
and a general moral instruction 
without a religious foundation is built on air; 
consequently, all character training and religion 
must be derived from faith.
— Adolf Hitler

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 10/29/12.)

Image credit: Hans Gerwitz, flickr, CC

C. S. Lewis Gets Morality Wrong

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C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity is a fundamental work in Christian apologetics. Many Christians point to this book as a turning point in their coming to faith, but Lewis’s ideas on morality need work.

Lewis says that there is a “real” right and wrong. If this were not so, how could we declare the Nazis wrong? Find a man who rejects this premise, Lewis says, and you will quickly detect the hypocrisy. He may break a promise to you, but as soon as you do the same, he declares that that’s not fair and falls back on a “real” rightness.

But it doesn’t work that way. “Right” and “wrong” come with an implied point of view. Of course I say that the Nazis were wrong, but when I do so, the word wrong is grounded in my point of view. (Kind of obvious, right? Whose point of view would I be using but my own?)

That statement is simply a less clumsy version of, “The Nazis were wrong according to Bob.” There is neither a need to imagine nor justification for an absolute standard.

Lewis doesn’t use the term “objective morality” (he wrote about 70 years ago, which explains a few odd phrasings), but I believe this is what he means by “real right and wrong.” Let’s use William Lane Craig’s definition for objective morality: “moral values that are valid and binding whether anybody believes in them or not.”

Despite Lewis’s claims, we needn’t imagine that morality is objectively grounded. We see this simply by looking in the dictionary. The definition of “morality” (or “right” or “wrong”) doesn’t require any sense of objective grounding or absoluteness.

Like Lewis, I insist that you keep your commitments to me, that you follow the basic rules of civility, and so on. When you don’t, I’m annoyed not because you violated an absolute law; you violated my law. It ain’t much, but it’s all I’ve got, and that’s enough to explain the morality we see around us.

To the person who insists that objective morality exists, I say: show me. Take a vexing moral issue—abortion, euthanasia, stem cell research, capital punishment, sex before marriage, torture, and so on—and show us the objectively true moral position. If you want to say that objective morality exists but it’s not reliably accessible, then what good is it? This kind of objective morality that looks nonexistent might as well be.

When we see a widespread sense of a shared morality within society, are we seeing universal moral truth? Or are we seeing universally held moral programming? That latter explanation is natural and does the job without the need to imagine an objective moral truth that doesn’t exist.

Evolution explains why part of morals is built-in. What we think of as proper morals has survival value. It’s not surprising that evolution would select for a moral instinct in social animals like humans. Evolution is often caricatured as being built on the principle “might makes right.” No, natural selection doesn’t favor might but fitness to the environment. A human tribe with trust and compassion might outcompete a more savage rival tribe without those traits.

We see this moral instinct in other animals. In a study of capuchin monkeys, for example, those given cucumber for completing a task complained when others got grapes (a preferred food) for the same task. These monkeys understood fairness just like a human. (An excellent video of the monkey’s reaction is here @1:18.)

As an aside, I think it’s a mistake to look down on other primates and their “less-developed” sense of morality. The same powerful brain that gives us honor and patriotism, justice and mercy, love and altruism, and other moral instincts that we’re proud of also gives us racism, self-pity, greed, resentment, hate, contempt, bitterness, jealousy, and all the others on the other side of the coin. No other species has perfected violence, slavery, cruelty, revenge, torture, and war to the extent that humans have.

If we exceed the morality of our primate cousins on the positive side, we also do so on the negative side. Let’s show a little humility.

Human morality is nicely explained by an instinctive and shared sense of the Golden Rule plus rules that are specific to each culture. The dictionary doesn’t demand any objective grounding in its definition of morality, and neither should we.

I believe in Christianity 
as I believe that the sun has risen: 
not only because I see it, 
but because by it I see everything else. 
— C. S. Lewis

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 10/17/12.)

Image credit: ho visto nina volare, flickr, CC

Video From 5/20/15 Debate at WWU

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Let me give the final bits to the debate last week.

Here are the opening remarks of my partner, blogger, author, and psychologist Valerie Tarico.

I prefer to listen to debates like this as audio only. If you’re like me, here is the audio (62MB), though the audio quality is better in the video.

Other posts about the debate:

Here’s the video. Note that the quality goes up to 1080p (use the settings gear in the bottom-right to adjust).

I pray a simple prayer every morning.
It’s an ecumenical prayer.
Whether you’re Catholic or Jewish or Muslim or Hindu,
I think it speaks to the heart of every faith.
It goes “Lord please break the laws of the universe
for my convenience. Amen.”
—  Emo Philips

Debate Results!

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We played to a packed house last night—about 550 people, including some friends who made the long drive up from Seattle. I don’t know what the special sauce was that made it happen, but Western Washington University had lots of students interested in the debate question, “Does God Exist?” They seemed a lot more engaged than that they were there just for extra credit.

I gave more information about the debate here. I expect to have access to the video in a few days and will make that available when I do.

The debate

The debate went as I suspected, with our Christian opponents avoiding the typical arguments that I hear from the conservative Protestant apologists—the Moral Argument, Design Argument, Transcendental Argument, Ontological Argument, Argument for the Truth of the New Testament, Fine Tuning Argument, Argument from Prophecy, Cosmological Argument, Who Would Die for a Lie? and so on.

I’ll let the debate video speak for itself, but let me give a quick summary of the Christian side. This presumably is a Catholic vs. Evangelical thing, but our opponents were pretty easy to agree with. To give you a flavor of what we were up against, here are some of their points:

  • Proofs for God don’t work
  • “God” has many definitions, and the God who scolded Saul for not killing enough Amalekites is not my god.
  • God is that whisper of something important in life; God is behind the wonder you see in a Hubble telescope image.
  • God is a mystery. Don’t think you have him figured out.

You can imagine how an atheist would object to some of this, but at least the Christian position wasn’t strident. The Catholic church meddles ineptly in some social issues (abortion, contraception, and same-sex marriage, for example) but that is mercifully a subset of the problems caused by some fundamentalist Protestants.

My debate approach is always to give some challenging arguments for atheism, preferably arguments that they are unlikely to have heard before. I’ve explored a couple of dozen in this blog, and the ones I picked for this debate were:

  1. Historians reject the Bible story
  2. Mormonism beats Christianity
  3. Because there’s a map of world religions
  4. God has no impact on reality

The results!

The debate used Oxford voting, which means that votes were taken before and after. The audience could decide between Yes God exists, No God doesn’t exist, and Undecided. The audience began with 18% undecided and the rest 3:1 in favor of God. Afterwards, some of the Undecideds had migrated. The official result was a 2% increase for the Affirmative (God exists) side and 3% for the Negative side. Go team!

If one believes that there is an omnipotent deity,
one can therefore believe absolutely anything else,
for everything else is thereby made possible.
— Descartes by A.C. Grayling

Christians Move the Goalposts When They Can’t Win Honestly

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Christian apologists often bring up unresolved scientific questions and usually conclude with, “Well, if you can’t answer that question, Christianity can! Clearly, God did it.”

Consider questions like: Why is there something rather than nothing? What came before the Big Bang? Why does the universe look fine-tuned for life? How did life come from nonlife?

If you can’t answer those, the Christian can.

Admittedly, there is no scientific consensus on these questions. But a century ago, Christian apologists pointed to different questions if they wanted to put science in the hot seat: Okay, Science, if you’re so smart, how could heredity be transmitted from just one tiny cell? What causes cancer? Where did the universe come from?

And centuries before that, the questions were: What causes lightning? Plague? Drought? Earthquakes?

But not only is science the sole discipline that has ever provided answers to questions like these—real answers, I mean, not made-up ones—increasingly only science can uncover the questions. That is, the apologist pretends to inform science of questions that science discovered itself.

If in hindsight “God did it” was a foolish response to the questions of previous centuries—the cause of lightning and disease, for example—why offer it now? Why expect the results to be any different when every single one of the last thousand natural mysteries have been unraveled by science rather than with the Bible? Why would the Christian think that today might be his lucky day? Wouldn’t it be wise to learn from the past and be a little hesitant to stake God’s existence on the gamble that science will finally come up short?

What’s especially maddening is science-y apologists like William Lane Craig putting on an imaginary lab coat and ineptly fiddling with beakers and turning dials, playing scientist like a child playing house. He imagines himself strutting into a community of befuddled scientists and saying with a chuckle, “Okay, fellas, Christianity can take it from here” and seeing them breathe a sigh of relief that the cavalry has finally come to bail them out of their intellectual predicament. He imagines that he can better answer questions that his discipline couldn’t even formulate.

This reminds me of the fable about Science scaling the highest peak of knowledge. After much difficulty, Science finally summits and is about to plant his flag when he looks over and sees Theology and Philosophy sitting there, looking at him. “What took you so long?” one of them says. “We’ve been here for centuries.”

Uh, yeah, Theology and Philosophy can invent claims, but Science does it the hard way—it actually uncovers the facts and makes the testable hypotheses. It gets to the summit step by careful step along the route of Evidence rather than floating there on a lavender cloud of imagination and wishful thinking. Religion is like the dog that walks under the ox and thinks that he is pulling the cart.

Religion will deserve more respect when it begins to teach us new things about reality like science does every day.

To the Christians who think that science’s unanswered questions make their point, I say: make a commitment. Publicly state that this issue (pick something—abiogenesis or the cause of the Big Bang or fine tuning or whatever) is the hill that you will fight to the death on. Man up, commit to it, and impose consequences. Say, “I publicly declare that God must be the resolution to this question. A scientific consensus will never find me wrong or else I will drop my faith.”

If the Christian fails to do this (or rather, when he fails to do this), he then admits that when his celebrated question du jour is resolved, he’ll discard it like a used tissue and find another in science’s long list of unanswered questions. He admits that his argument devolves to, “Science has unanswered questions; therefore, God.” He admits that this is just a rhetorical device, stated only for show, rather than being a serious argument.

He’ll just move the goalposts. Again.

In science it often happens that scientists say, 
“You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,”
and then they actually change their minds 
and you never hear that old view from them again. 
They really do it. 
It doesn’t happen as often as it should, 
because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. 
But it happens every day. 
I cannot recall the last time something like that 
happened in politics or religion. 
— Carl Sagan, 1987 CSICOP keynote address

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 9/28/12.)

Image credit: grassrootsgroundswell, flickr, CC

Upcoming Debate: Does God Exist?

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debateIf you’re in the greater Seattle area, you may want to attend an upcoming debate on the topic “Does God Exist?” The organizers recently had to find a new venue because the original 400-seat lecture hall would be too small, so it should be a lively evening.

The debate will use a two-on-two format, like that used by Intelligence Squared debates. Each of the speakers will make a 10-minute opening. Next, in the same order, a 3-minute rebuttal. There will be Q&A, with the moderator asking questions submitted in writing by the audience. And finally, two minutes each for closing remarks.

Oxford voting will be used, which means that votes (Agree, Disagree, or Undecided) will be taken before and after. The change in the tally will determine the winner. (To please the audience, I’ll have to be on my best behavior!)

Opponents

My partner on the negative side of the question will be psychologist Dr. Valerie Tarico. A former evangelical, she explores her own past and the way out in Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light. Her excellent video series “God’s Emotions” puts God on the couch to see why God (or the marionette known as God) acts the way he does. Her knowledge of psychology, important to understanding so many aspects of Christianity, will be a great compliment my more argumentative style.

Our two opponents are from Seattle University, a Jesuit institution. Dr. Mark Markuly is the Dean of the School of Theology and Ministry, and Rev. Mike Raschko Ph.D is a professor of Catholic Systematic Theology.

Details

Date and Time: Wednesday, May 20 at 7:30pm

Location: Performing Arts Center (PAC) Concert Hall, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA (directions)

It will be recorded, and I’ll make a link available as soon as I get it.

[In theology,] expertise is demonstrated
not by mastering knowledge about the divine,
but mastering speculations that other people have made about the divine.
As ex-preacher Dan Barker likes to say,
“Theology is a subject without an object.
Theologians don’t study God;
they study what other theologians have said about God.”
— Jerry Coyne

Image credit: Wonderlane, flickr, CC