My paper, “Why the Horrendous deeds objection is still a bad argument” has now been published by Sophia here. The abstract is as follows:
A common objection to divine command meta-ethics (‘DCM’) is the horrendous deeds objection. Critics object that if DCM is true, anything at all could be right, no matter how abhorrent or horrendous. Defenders of DCM have responded by contending that God is essentially good: God has certain character traits essentially, such as being loving and just. A person with these character traits cannot command just anything. In recent discussions of DCM, this ‘essential goodness response’ has come under fire. Critics of DCM have offered various objections to the essential goodness response. This paper responds to these critics. I examine and refute six such objections: (a) the objection from counterpossibles, (b) the objection from omnipotence, (c) the objection from requirements of justice, (d) the objection from God’s moral grounding power, (e) the objection from evil and indifferent deities, and (f) the epistemological objection. I will maintain that despite all that has been said about the horrendous deeds objection in recent analytic philosophy, the horrendous deeds argument is still a bad argument.
A pre-published copy is available on my academia.edu page.
Tags: Brad Hooker · Divine Command Theory · Erik Wielenberg · Euthyphro Dilemma · God and Morality · Jason Thibodeau · Louise Anthony · Walter Sinnott-Armstrong · Wes Morriston3 Comments
A common objection to belief in the God of the Bible is that a good, kind, and loving deity would never command the wholesale slaughter of nations. In the tradition of his popular Is God a Moral Monster?, Paul Copan teams up with Matthew Flannagan to tackle some of the most confusing and uncomfortable passages of Scripture. Together they help the Christian and nonbeliever alike understand the biblical, theological, philosophical, and ethical implications of Old Testament warfare passages.
Congratulations
Your paper apparently silently presumes that God would never command a man to rape a woman (and you’d be out of a job if you ever pretended God might possibly command rape).
And it is clear in ALL of your apologetics writings that you want the world to know that unbelievers cannot be reasonable in accusing the bible-god of atrocities.
I offer a DCT argument to refute one particular belief of yours, namely, that those who accuse the bible-god of moral atrocities are unreasonable. On the contrary, we are equally as reasonable as anybody who accuses the KJV of having translation mistakes.
The atheist’s alleged inability to properly ground morals wouldn’t help you overcome this rebuttal even if that accusation was true. YOU believe burning a child to death is worse than raping him or her, so if I can show that your own presuppositions require that God caused people to burn children to death, you will be forced to logically conclude that your god has committed atrocities worse than rape.
God said through Isaiah in 700 b.c. that He caused the Assyrians to commit their war-atrocities:
5 Woe to Assyria, the rod of My anger And the staff in whose hands is My indignation,
6 I send it against a godless nation And commission it against the people of My fury To capture booty and to seize plunder, And to trample them down like mud in the streets. (Isa. 10:5-6 NAU)
Ashurnasirpal II was king of Assyria from 883 to 859, and admitted “I burnt their adolescent boys [and] girls.” You may trifle that this was typical semitic exaggeration, but the fact that we have pictorial reliefs portraying Assyrians “flaying alive” their prisoners certainly makes it reasonable for a person to conclude that Ashurnasirpal’s boasts were true to reality. The production date for such relief is 660BC-650BC, so the specific sort of Assyrians that Isaiah speaks about in 700 b.c aren’t likely less barbaric than Ashurnasirpal II.
To say nothing of the fact that every Assyriologist I’ve come across acts as if the literal truth of the Assyrian war atrocities was a foregone conclusion. One example is BAR 17:01 (Jan/Feb 1991), “Grisly Assyrian Record of Torture and Death”
By Erika Belibtreu, professor of Near Eastern Archaeology at Vienna University, where she has worked since 1963.
You can hardly fault atheists for failing to notice all that “semitic exaggeration” when actual Assyriologists think such descriptions are telling about actual realities. Just like you cannot fault the ignorant teenage girl who “accepts Jesus” in an inerrantist Evangelical church on the basis of writings by Norman Geisler, and doesn’t notice all the obvious philosophical blunders he committed.
I can predict you will trifle that God’s use of the Assyrians doesn’t mean he “caused” them to burn children to death, but Isaiah continues in ch. 10 and uses an analogy that makes the Assyrian the axe, and God is the one who uses it to chop things with:
12 So it will be that when the Lord has completed all His work on Mount Zion and on Jerusalem, He will say, “I will punish the fruit of the arrogant heart of the king of Assyria and the pomp of his haughtiness.”
13 For he has said, “By the power of my hand and by my wisdom I did this, For I have understanding; And I removed the boundaries of the peoples And plundered their treasures, And like a mighty man I brought down their inhabitants,
14 And my hand reached to the riches of the peoples like a nest, And as one gathers abandoned eggs, I gathered all the earth; And there was not one that flapped its wing or opened its beak or chirped.”
15 Is the axe to boast itself over the one who chops with it? Is the saw to exalt itself over the one who wields it? That would be like a club wielding those who lift it, Or like a rod lifting him who is not wood. (Isa. 10:12-15 NAU)
Hence, your theory that unbelievers can never be reasonable to accuse the bible-god of atrocities worse than child-rape, is false.
Barry,
Have you actually read the paper? That comment suggests you didn’t get past the first page.
And the rest of the post seems to simply be on a different topic.