On Monday 2 August at the University of Auckland Emeritus Professor of Philosophy Dr Raymond Bradley and Dr Matthew Flannagan (of this blog) debated the topic “Is God the Source of Morality? Is it rational to ground right and wrong in commands issued by God?” For the benefit of those who could not be there, who are awaiting the editing and uploading of the video of the debate, we will be running a blog series where we bring you some of the debate in written form.

Matthew Flannagan’s Reply to Raymond Bradley

I agree with Ray entirely that one should avoid sophistry.

1. Ray started off by asserting that no one “is above the law” but that is the question we are arguing about tonight. You cannot establish your positions by citing a slogan. And incidentally, there are people who are above the law – Americans, for example, are not bound by New Zealand law.

2. Ray did go on to give some arguments for this idea. He attacked my contention that God does not have duties and he says that this entails relativism, that this denies the objectivity of truth. I disagree. To say that something is objective is to say that it is true or false independently of whether a human person accepts or agrees with it. It seems that Ray wants to define objectivity so that it is true or false regardless of what anyone thinks. Well if that is your definition of objectivity then you have a problem because nothing is objective in this sense. Nothing is true or false independently of what an omniscient being thinks, because an omniscient being does not believe false propositions.

In fact Ray’s example of the heliocentric hypothesis is not objective in the sense he said.  He said it is true or false regardless what God said or did. But hang on, if God exists then he is the creator and sustainer of the universe, he created the heliocentric universe and holds it in existence. So I beg to differ, if God exists then the heliocentric hypothesis is not objectively true in the strong sense that Ray talked about.

3. Ray said that I contradicted myself because I accept the objectivity of truth and I also I accept the divine command theory. But this is not true. I never defined objectivity as being true or false regardless of what anyone else thinks. I have always defined objectivity as true or false regardless of what humans think. There is no contradiction here, just misrepresentation.

4. Ray asked ‘Matt says in the bible God’s commands are given to some people and not to others, how do we tell which ones?’ Easy. Read the texts and look at the context.

5. Ray then asked “should we kill them today?” I addressed this in my opening statement. There I pointed out that in Ancient Near Eastern legal texts the commands probably did not mean this. I pointed out that in Ancient Near Eastern legal codes and in the Torah, such sanctions were generally not intended to be complied with literally but in practice a monetary fine was paid to ransom one’s life. Simply asserting something I have already responded to is not really a rebuttal.

6. Ray then said that I try to side-step this position by saying ‘God is good,’ but on the contrary he said that – the definition that I used was from his paper.

7. He then said that I claim God could not do any of the things he said. But I did not say this. What I said was that there are certain actions that a perfectly good being would not do. I did not necessarily say that a perfectly good being could not do any of the things he said. In fact, I think Ray’s claim here – that things like plagues or floods or killing non-combatants are such that a perfectly good being could never bring them about – is just false.  A perfectly good being could not bring about these sorts of thing unless a greater good is produced or greater evil averted.

Let me give you an example. During WWII the allies bombed German cities, which maimed and killed thousands of women and children. Leading ethicist Michael Walzer has argued that if we knew that the only way to defeat the Nazis was to bomb these cities then we were justified in doing so. The alternative of not bombing would have been to hand Europe and the world over to a much greater evil – occupation and domination by the Nazis. So let me put this to you, if you knew for certain that the only way to avert one evil would be to engage in another evil then is it really impossible for a perfectly good being to endorse your doing so? Are you willing to state that it is impossible for a perfectly good being to do so?

So the issue is not whether bad things happen in a world governed by a perfectly good God. The issue is whether there are greater goods or some over-arching reason which justifies them. Ray has done nothing to show that this is not true tonight.

8. Ray goes on to say that you can define God anyway you like but that defining God this way does not prove he exists. I agree. My argument was not a proof for the existence of God, my argument was whether God, conceived a certain way, is a defensible ground of morality (the topic of tonight’s debate) and in this context, all I have to ask is how we are defining God for the purpose of that question.

9. He goes on to talk about the issue of the Canaanites and my response to that issue. He said, of the other passages that suggest that this did not literally happen, “well that’s a contradiction.” Now, it is a contradiction if you take it literally but that is my point – you should not take it literally. Does Ray intend that we should take Egyptian war histories as contradictory or Hittite ones seeing as that kind of “contradiction” is common in Ancient Near Eastern literature?

Ray claims that I said that it doesn’t really mean ‘kill all,’ it means ‘kill some.’ But that is not what I said. What I said was that it was a hyperbolic way of saying ‘victory,’ a reference to ‘winning.’ Just like when we say “we kicked their butt” it does not mean we actually kicked the person’s butt, it is a hyperbolic way of saying ‘victory’. Once you realise this you cannot go from the text to the conclusions that ‘all women and children were killed’ or ‘some women and children were killed.’ The text just says they won. That’s all.

And the text does not say just some were left. This is a stark contrast in the text. The text says, if you take it literally, “everyone was wiped out” and then it says “there were huge numbers of them so many we could not win.” This is not a case of a small number, this is a stark contrast.

10. In response to my arguments regarding capital punishment Ray said “God didn’t really mean what he said.” But did you notice that Ray’s talk was full of metaphors? Did you notice he wanted to ‘put God in a logical straight-jacket?’ Did you notice that when he wanted to indict God for torturing people forever he said that the word “lamb” meant Christ? So Ray is quite willing to recognise and use figurative language and has throughout his talk. Should I say that Ray clearly does not mean what he says? That he is a poor communicator because he uses metaphorical language?

11. Then Ray goes on to Hell. He says “well being burnt for a short period of time isn’t very nice.” But as I pointed out, these passages are taken from parables. Ray repeated the idea that these people are going to be killed for their beliefs and punished merely because they have not heard. But I specifically pointed out in my opening remarks that the Bible does not say that people are destroyed for these reasons.

12. Finally we turn to the issue of Noah’s flood and here I think he laid his cards on the table. Ray asked “are you going to say this is not literally true?” Notice Ray is a creationist. Ray assumed a fundamentalist reading of the book of Genesis. He then turned around and said that science disproves this. In actual fact a lot of evangelical biblical scholars will tell you that when you look at early chapters of Genesis and you compare it with Babylonian literature of the same period of time it is clear that this is probably not meant to be a historical story. This is not news to biblical scholars, it is apparently news to Ray Bradley.

So in response I agree that we should avoid sophistry, we should look at the arguments on their merits and I do not think that Ray’s arguments have merit. He said a lot of funny things and I appreciate that. He has accused me of dodging. He has accused me of sophistry, and I understand in the context of a debate things like that will be said. But I think the substance of what he said consists not only of misrepresenting the bible, but also, in his reply, he misrepresented me.

Please note that this series is not a transcript of the debate. Each post in this series is effectively a very close approximation of what was said on the night and has been put together from the papers and notes each speaker prepared and spoke from plus any additions each recalled making and in the case of this post, from the audio of the debate.

RELATED POSTS:
Video: Bradley v Flannagan “Is God the Source of Morality?
The Podcast: Bradley v Flannagan
Joint Communique: Bradley v Flannagan Debate
Raymond Bradley’s Opening Statement: Bradley v Flannagan Debate
Matthew Flannagan’s Opening Statement: Bradley v Flannagan Debate
Bradley’s Reply to Matt: Bradley v Flannagan Debate
Glenn Peoples’ Review: Bradley v Flannagan Debate

Tags:   Debates · Matthew Flannagan · Raymond Bradley4 Comments