What about moral truths? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.
Since I have been skipping some chapters, it’s now easier to just go by what the subject is. It’s about time Paulos got to the question of morality. As for me, I see morality as a subset of goodness in that in order for the idea of the moral to exist, the good of which it is a part has to exist first.
At any rate, let’s get to it.
1. Across cultures the similarities in what’s considered right or wrong are strikingly apparent.
2. The best explanation for these similarities is that they stem from God.
3. Therefore God exists.
Paulos, John Allen. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up (pp. 122-123). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
This isn’t exactly how I would phrase it. I would simply say that if God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist. That is because goodness would not exist as goodness is an immaterial reality and not a material one.
Count on Paulos to think he can easily deal with the first two claims. Let’s see how he does.
Of course, proponents of the argument don’t say much about the blasphemers, disobedient sons, homosexuals, Sabbath workers, and others who, the Bible demands, should be stoned to death. Happily, even most believers today don’t believe this. Nor do they expatiate on the similarities of the draconian constraints on women—single, married, or widowed—sanctioned by Christian, Muslim, and Hindu theology. The general point is that, contrary to Assumption 1, the similarity of moral codes across cultures is either somewhat dubious except on the broadest level—murder, theft, child care, basic honesty—or else not something proponents wish to herald. Assumption 2 is even weaker than Assumption 1. There is a compelling and irreligious alternative to it: an evolutionary explanation for the similarity of moral codes. Humans, even before they were humans, have always had to deal with a set of basic requirements. How will they get food, keep warm, protect themselves from predators and other humans, mate, and reproduce? Any group that doesn’t meet these basic requirements doesn’t last long.
Paulos, John Allen. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up (pp. 123-124). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
The first paragraph is just an appeal to emotion and saying “These people did stuff I don’t like.” What of it? You can only complain about that if objective moral values exist. If they don’t exist, there’s nothing fine with celebrating same-sex attracted people or stoning them to death. Both of those just are.
For the second, Paulos is confusing ontology with epistemology. I could grant him entirely that we came to know moral truths through an evolutionary system and yet the question is not how do we know morality, but how is there a morality to know. For evolution to get us to know truths, those truths have to exist prior to evolution. If all he says is “These work” then we have to ask “For what end?” which assumes that that end is good.
If He chose the laws capriciously, then it makes little sense to say that God is good, since He arbitrarily concocted the very notion of the good Himself. On the other hand, if God chose the laws He did because they are the correct ones and encapsulate the good, then their correctness and the good are independent notions that don’t require God. Furthermore, He is presumably Himself subject to the preexisting moral laws, in which case there’s once again little reason to introduce Him as an intermediary between the moral laws and humans.
Paulos, John Allen. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up (pp. 124-125). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
Classical theism deals with all of this. We define good as that at which all things aim and God is the epitome of that, the ultimate actualization. Goodness is based on what a thing is. Without God, goodness has no meaning. Not only that, no. God is not subject to moral laws. That’s a nonsense claim.
Of course, don’t count on someone like Paulos to seriously study what he’s talking about. He might be too busy helping women trick men out of money.
He later can’t help another potshot when he says:
Throughout the world, for example, pi, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, is the same number, approximately 3.14 (except in the Bible, where inerrancy apparently extends to only one significant figure and it’s stated to be 3).
Paulos, John Allen. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up (p. 127). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
Last I checked, Purple Math is just simply a math site and yet, they dealt with this objection. Paulos is the guy who just looked up something and jumped up and down like he had found buried treasure. He is totally unaware that people have been examining these claims for thousands of years.
Next he deals with a similar argument about math. Why is it that math explains the universe when it would seem to be just ideas in our heads?
He says:
But is the usefulness of mathematics, although indubitable, really so mysterious? It seems to me that as with the argument from moral universality there is a quite compelling alternative explanation. Why is mathematics so useful? Well, we count, we measure, we employ basic logic, and these activities were stimulated by ubiquitous aspects of the physical world. Even such common experiences as standing up straight, pushing and pulling objects, and moving about in the world prepare us to form quasimathematical ideas and to internalize the associations among them.
Paulos, John Allen. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up (p. 129). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
And then says that:
The universe acts on us, we adapt to it, and the notions that we develop as a result, including the mathematical ones, are in a sense taught us by the universe. Evolution has selected those of our ancestors (both human and not) whose behavior and thought were consistent with the workings of the universe. The aforementioned French mathematician Henri Poincaré, who came within a hairbreadth of discovering special relativity, agreed. He wrote, “By natural selection our mind has adapted itself to the conditions of the external world. It has adopted the geometry most advantageous to the species or, in other words, the most convenient.” The usefulness of mathematics, it seems, is not so unreasonable.
Paulos, John Allen. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up (pp. 131-132). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
But this is the exact same problem he has with morality. He confuses epistemology and ontology. Well, of course it works! We couldn’t do our measurements without it! No one is disputing that! We want to know why it works.
Tomorrow, he’s going to take a look at what he calls gambling in dealing with Pascal’s wager. Spoiler alert: He doesn’t understand it.
In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)
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