On 11 September 2001 Islamic terrorists flew two planes into the World Trade Centre killing thousands of innocent people. Ostensibly they did this because they believed God commanded them to do so. This event has invigorated a fear latent in the Western psyche since the 17th century when wars of religion tore Europe apart, the fear of religious fanaticism, of people willing to murder hundreds in the name of God. These fears were centre-stage recently at a Conference held by the Centre for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame. Sceptics presenting at the conference argued passionately that the God of the bible issues commands which are at odds with contemporary modern understandings of morality. Adultery is punished with death; on some occasions, God is portrayed as commanding the killing of non-combatants in “holy wars” against the local Canaanite population.

There is a lot that can be said about these concerns and in a short column I cannot say everything. In many instances I think the sceptics fail to appreciate the context and genre of the passages they cite. They fail to appreciate, for example, that Ancient Near Eastern conquest accounts employ highly figurative rhetoric, which hyperbolically describe victories in terms of total annihilation of the enemy. They fail to appreciate that Ancient Near Eastern legal texts, as noted by Raymond Westbrook, “reflect the scribal compilers’ concern for perfect symmetry and delicious irony rather than the pragmatic experience of the law courts.” Or that, as JJ Finkelstein points out, they “were not meant to be complied with literally” but to “serve an admonitory function” and so probably do not command execution for the crimes mentioned. Sceptics can fail to grasp that claiming the bible is God’s word does not mean it did not come to us mediated through the writings of human beings who wrote in a particular time and place using the language, rhetoric and literary conventions of their time and so and frequently they fail to appreciate the bible is a Canon and that passages need to be read in their broader context i.e. taking into account the whole bible. A full articulation of these points, however, would take more space than I can here muster.

Instead I will address another feature of this issue which concerns the general method in play here. In each case the sceptic takes a purported divine command and compares it to a moral belief that he takes to be correct. The conclusion he draws is that the purported command is inauthentic. This is of course a possibility; there is, however, another possibility that on at least some occasions, moral statements these sceptics are relying on are mistaken.

This feature of the dialectic became clear to me after a public debate I had on these issues in August. A sceptic wrote to me claiming that even granting the issues about the genre of the biblical text, the bible still presents a picture of God who issues commands out of accord with contemporary modern understandings of morality.  Suppose one grants that when read in its literary context, the Torah does not literally prescribe the death penalty for adultery or sodomy, it still is condemning sexual activity between consenting adults. This raises an interesting question, why does the sceptic assume that God, if he existed, would be a contemporary western liberal? Why assume that he would never command anything politically incorrect or out of accord with trendy Western mores? The sceptic assumes that it is appropriate to assess purported divine commands with his own moral perspective. Why?

The most sustained argument for this method I know of comes from a Moral Philosopher at Yale University, Robert Adams, in his excellent book Finite and Infinite Goods. Adams states that “Our existing moral beliefs are bound in practise, and I think, ought in principle, to be a constraint on our beliefs about what God commands.”

Adams reasons that we can only accept the claim that Gods commands constitute our moral duties if God is understood as perfectly good; if God were evil or morally indifferent then it would be possible for him to command wrongdoing and we cannot have a duty to do wrong. Once this assumption is granted, however, one cannot coherently say that God has commanded just anything. We have some grasp of what goodness is, what counts as right and wrong, what kinds of things a good person does not command. Therefore, God cannot coherently be called good if what he commands is contrary to “our existing moral beliefs”. As Philosopher Raymond Bradley notes, to do so would be “playing word games which are intellectually dishonest” that deprive “the word ‘holy’ of its ordinary meaning and make it a synonym for ‘evil’.”

In response, I will simply note that critics of Adams’ argument have shown that as it stands it needs qualifying. It is true we have some grasp of what goodness is but this is mitigated by two factors.

First, our moral judgements are fallible. While God does not command wrongdoing it is likely that a perfectly good omniscient being would at some time command something contrary to what we think is wrong. To say otherwise dogmatically assumes that we are such good judges of morality that God could never disagree with us.

Second, our moral concepts are subject to revision. We change our opinions about the goodness and rightness of certain things without “playing word games which are intellectually dishonest” or depriving “the word ‘holy’ of its ordinary meaning and make it a synonym for ‘evil.’” If this were not the case then one could never honestly or rationally change one’s mind on an ethical issue.

Consequently, Adams’ argument does not show we cannot attribute to God’s commands contrary to “our existing moral beliefs”. Rather, as he says elsewhere, we cannot coherently ascribe to “God a set of commands that is too much at variance with the ethical outlook we bring to our ethical thinking.” Elsewhere he allows for “the possibility of a conversion in which one’s whole ethical outlook is revolutionized, and reorganized around a new center” but “we can hardly hold open the possibility of anything too closely approaching a revolution in which, so to speak, good and evil would trade places”.

Therefore, Adams does not establish the claim that “our existing moral beliefs must serve as a constraint on our beliefs about what God commands.” It does, on the other hand, suggest that we cannot coherently “accept a theological ethics that ascribes to God a set of commands that is too much at variance with the ethical outlook we bring to our ethical thinking.”  Adams argues that we cannot coherently or defensibly accept a theological ethics which, in effect, makes good and evil trade places and which so radically transforms our concept of goodness that it becomes a synonym for what we call evil. Nor could we accept an ethical system that calls our concept of goodness so radically into question that it breaks down.

Certain beliefs such as, “that killing, assault, theft and lying are in general wrong and can only be justified if some overriding moral reason applies” or that without special overriding reason it is wrong to inflict pain and suffering on others or treat them with contempt” are so central to our account of goodness that we cannot coherently accept that a perfectly good being has issued commands which negate them. However, many moral claims are highly controversial and such that people can debate them and change their minds on them and so on. When they do it is implausible to suggest that their concept of goodness was so radically at odds with previous beliefs that “good and evil would trade places” or that it is merely a word game that the position holding these things could be endorsed by a good person.

Consider, for example, the debate over whether the bombing of Hiroshima was justified because it saved a huge number of lives by ending a war early. While I myself do not share this opinion, I would not say that it is obviously self-contradictory.

Similarly, consider moral debates about capital punishment or euthanasia or affirmative action. While I believe there are defensible and justified answers to these questions, I doubt we can dismiss those views we disagree with as conceptually incoherent, as being so radically at odds with our understanding of good so as to be incomprehensible or merely semantic gymnastics. Even when we disagree with people on these issues in many instances we need to take what they say with real seriousness and be open to the possibility that they are right and we are wrong.

This means one should not be too quick to dismiss a purported divine command merely because it is contrary to a contemporary liberal morality. Obviously one cannot coherently attribute anything at all to God and claim he is good and Adams is correct that we cannot accept a theological ethics that ascribes to God a set of commands that is too much at variance with the ethical outlook we bring to our ethical thinking. However, one function of theological reflection is to critique our contemporary mores and an authentic encounter with God’s will is likely to contrast with some of our moral beliefs.  It is sheer hubris to suggest God would always agree with us. Is it really impossible for an all knowing, all good being to disagree with us on the seriousness of adultery or the propriety of capital punishment? To say no is to tacitly assume that modern 21^st century liberal westerners have made no mistakes and their understanding of morality is infallible and inerrant. Those who make such an assumption have a dogmatically certain faith in contemporary liberal mores. Such attitudes are normally attributed predominantly to religious fundamentalists and I think the irony of this speaks for itself.

I write a monthly column for Investigate Magazine entitled “Contra Mundum.” This blog post was published in the February 2011 issue and is reproduced here with permission. Contra Mundum is Latin for ‘against the world;’ the phrase is usually attributed to Athanasius who was exiled for defending Christian orthodoxy.

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Tags:   9/11 · Contra Mundum · God and Morality · Hermeneutics · J J Finkelstein · Raymond Bradley · Raymond Westbrook · Robert Adams · World Trade Centre15 Comments