Based on the book by the same name by Peter S Williams
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This is alll; very hard to understand. You may have covered his , but if so i haven't understood: if there is an objective law of morality how can it be that people rarely agree as to what their moral obligations are, morals seem to exist on a sliding scale with no absolutes. Some woulld say any act of killing another person is immoral, other would say it is within moral laws if in war, or a mercy killing such as voluntary euthanasia, there are infinite shades on a scale and how do we know which is 'right'?
By the way, if I came to the lecture would it be OK to bring my 13 year old son along, he is very interested and quite mature.
It is fine to bring your son to the course - All Saints church hall, Church Street, on Monday at 7.45.
Right - your question is "If there is an objective law of morality, how can it be that people rarely agree as to what their moral obligations are, morals seem to exist on a sliding scale with no absolutes"
I would say that although I believe in objective morality, being a Christian, it is not the sort of morality that forces others to believe in it. Therefore people have the freedom to develop their own system of morality, sadly not always according to what God would wish.
Of course, speaking as a Christian I have a very clear sense of what I believe "objective" morality, or God's morality is - for example, the ten commandments, or the Sermon on the Mount (Love your neighbour etc).
However, this morality is not believed by everyone. Therefore you are right when you say people have their own systems of morality.
For the Christian faith and morality are interlinked. This does not mean people who do not have faith cannot have a good system of morality.
It is very complex and I could write pages but I fear my comments could be miscontrued - I would rather talk about this very complex issue. I will try and explain more on Monday.
Sorry its not a very good answer !Its a very good question
I have just thought of an analogy which may help to explain what I am trying to say.
Imagine there were four different tribes who sat in a wood. They were told that beyond the wood there was a very large mountain. They were asked to draw the mountain although they had not seen it.
Each attempt at the drawing was excellent. Each tried to imagine what the mountain was like.
Then they walked out of the wood and saw the mountain.
The tribes represent the different peoples of the world. The wood represents our lack of vision of God. The mountain represents true good and evil and God also.
Each attempt is a valid attempt to come to the truth of what is right and wrong. Some may be closer to what is right and wrong, but each is equally valid in terms of attempt, not equally valid in terms of final product (a subtle distinction).
The atheist says the mountain (objective morality) does not exist and that each tribe's attempts together can be taken to be morality as commonly understood. However, this changes when the next four tribes come down and try the drawing game again.
The believer says that right and wrong does exist objectively, that people groups or tribes have some understanding of it, but only when people truly encounter God (in heaven) do they truly know right and wrong.
This is not a perfect analogy and has a lot of holes in it but I hope it helps.
I have just thought of something after reading the mountain analogy - is part of what you were explaining that, regardless of what the actual definition of morality held by any individual or group, if we agree that we do hold morals at all it is evidence of a greater power (God / 'mountain')?
What I meant is that there are two ways of looking on morality - it is either "human made" or "not made by humans". If it is human made then in the analogy the mountain does not really exist - people just try and invent their own mountain. If it is not human made, but exists independently of humans, then the mountain really is there - morality, good or evil, exists independently of what humans think morality to be. This suggests to me that it has a source in God.
I would say that each culture's understanding of morality points towards there being a God but is not a proof of there being a God.
Its not easy to explan but hopefully when I talk about this tomorrow I should be able to make things a little clearer!
Your talk on morality: G.d is the 'out there beyond human grasp' or what I would call the 'given' (like the analogy of rain)objective from whence morality springs. But humans may put a subjective interpretation on how they deal with moral issues. is this a selective picking and choosing of what suits the protagonist's argument? Or is it 'horse and carriage'. Which given the human participation makes morality subjective. Now, the blog comment. You say "like the 10 Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount". That is, similarly to the 'objective or subjective' argument,(but different content in a sense) this is taking the moral standards from both the O.T. and the N.T. Paul of Tarsus would say that (sic) Christians should take the teaching of Jesus (and by rote the synoptic gospels and etc) as the New Church, putting aside the trappings of the old (Judaism). Therefore is it incorrect for a Christian to include the '10' in his standard or for a Jew to denounce the 'Sermon' simply because it is not part of the Hebrew Scriptures? If you agree with with the evolution theory of morality being suseptible to change, the answer would be "no", and apparently Christians say "no" too. They are being subjective not objective even though the Christian teaching comes through a link to G.d via His Son i.e. 'given'. n.b. I am sorry I can't seem to sign in with my name - but I'm sure you know this anon is Linda!
I have emailed Peter S Williams, the writer of the Case for God for guidance here as he is a lot brainier than I.
He has emailed me back and hear is his reply. Its getting quite hard for me to follow some of this - I am not as intelligent as either you or him!
Here is his wording now.....
Dear Simon,
nice to hear form you - I think I would make the following brief responses, which I hope scratch the correct itch!
1) The central question here is not whether any individual or group has a true grasp of objective values, but whether there are any objective values for anyone to grasp or fail to grasp! If there are, and if such values couldn't exist without a transcendent, personal being to 'ground' them, then such a being must exist, This is the moral argument for God - it is of course not an argument for Christian Theism, but only an argument for theism.
2) I would be careful about claiming that God is beyond human grasp, since this appears to be a proposition that claims to grasp something about God! I would, rather, claim that God is not wholly beyond human grasp - but he is beyond human comprehension. There is a distinction between understanding something and comprehending it. I understand, to some extent, how this computer I am typing on works; but I don't comprehend it. Likewise with God. I understanding truthfully, in part, 'through a glass, darkly'!
3) Jesus said that the ten commandments were an unpacking of the imperative to love God with all one's being and to love one's neighour as oneself - one can view them as second order moral commands which supervein upon the first order moral command given by Jesus.
4) The philosophical trouble with any list of do's and don'ts (the so-called 'dentological' approach to ethics) is that a) it has a tendancy to focus one on the externals of conformity to a set of instructions, and b) one can often imagine situations in which one command comes into conflict with another, and the list itself gives one no guidence in such a situation. e.g. I am commanded not to lie, but also I am commanded not to take life (and, by extention, to protect life); so - as the now standard moral question goes - what should I do if my government asks me to point out any people I know so that they can kill them? Should I lie to protect life, or be honest and let someone die? This is where realising that moral values are grounded in the character of an all-good God helps us to see that since there can be no conflict in the coherent nature of the personal ground of morality (God), so there can be no conflict between second order moral values - the problem lies in the non-comprehensive nature of our subjective grasp of what the first order moral value of God's character entails in the detail of our contingent situation (i.e., just because moral value is objective doesn't mean we find it easy to know what the right thing to do is all the time!).
Hence, one reasons that the duty to protect the innocent is of over-riding importance compared to the duty not to lie.
One could attempt to add this fact to the rule book, as it were, by inserting a third order rule to this effect. But then one would have to do this for every instance of apparent conflict, and the rule book becomes very big and unwieldy!
On the other hand, one can focus more on the first order ground of value - which entails these second, and third order commands - that is, the character of God, who 'is love', and upon the 'virtue ethics' approach of character formation. The more one's character is shaped after the likeness, or 'image' of the God who 'is love', the more 'second-nature' it becomes to make the right moral choice from the ground up, rather than from the top-down as it were - this is, I think, one aspect of the Christian notion of sanctification, of 'putting on Christ'.
As Augustine said, 'Love God, and do what thou wilt' - because IF one loves God, THEN one will only want to do what he wants. In point of fact, I suppose that both bottom-up and top-down approaches to morality form a mutually re-inforcing whole, a virtuous hermenutical spiral. Our finite, fallen natures mean we have imperfect and incomplete subjective grasps both of God's first order character - the ground of objective moral value - and of the consequent second/third order moral values that flow as a consequence from it - but each can help us to get a better grasp of the other.
In short, when one recognizes the distinction between the bottom-up, first order, ground of objective value in God's character, virtue ethics (santification) approach to ethics, and the 'top down', 'here are the rules of thumb that do a good job of begining to cash out in a way easily grasped by finite humans the second order commands and/or duties which flow from the first-order duty to 'be like God, who is perfect' and who 'is love' - then one can perhaps get a better grasp of what Jesus meant when he said that he had not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it.
Somewhat off the top of my head - but I hope it helps!! Feel free to copy and paste!
7 comments:
This is alll; very hard to understand. You may have covered his , but if so i haven't understood: if there is an objective law of morality how can it be that people rarely agree as to what their moral obligations are, morals seem to exist on a sliding scale with no absolutes. Some woulld say any act of killing another person is immoral, other would say it is within moral laws if in war, or a mercy killing such as voluntary euthanasia, there are infinite shades on a scale and how do we know which is 'right'?
By the way, if I came to the lecture would it be OK to bring my 13 year old son along, he is very interested and quite mature.
Thanks Karen
It is fine to bring your son to the course - All Saints church hall, Church Street, on Monday at 7.45.
Right - your question is
"If there is an objective law of morality, how can it be that people rarely agree as to what their moral obligations are, morals seem to exist on a sliding scale with no absolutes"
I would say that although I believe in objective morality, being a Christian, it is not the sort of morality that forces others to believe in it. Therefore people have the freedom to develop their own system of morality, sadly not always according to what God would wish.
Of course, speaking as a Christian I have a very clear sense of what I believe "objective" morality, or God's morality is - for example, the ten commandments, or the Sermon on the Mount (Love your neighbour etc).
However, this morality is not believed by everyone. Therefore you are right when you say people have their own systems of morality.
For the Christian faith and morality are interlinked. This does not mean people who do not have faith cannot have a good system of morality.
It is very complex and I could write pages but I fear my comments could be miscontrued - I would rather talk about this very complex issue. I will try and explain more on Monday.
Sorry its not a very good answer !Its a very good question
I have just thought of an analogy which may help to explain what I am trying to say.
Imagine there were four different tribes who sat in a wood. They were told that beyond the wood there was a very large mountain. They were asked to draw the mountain although they had not seen it.
Each attempt at the drawing was excellent. Each tried to imagine what the mountain was like.
Then they walked out of the wood and saw the mountain.
The tribes represent the different peoples of the world.
The wood represents our lack of vision of God.
The mountain represents true good and evil and God also.
Each attempt is a valid attempt to come to the truth of what is right and wrong. Some may be closer to what is right and wrong, but each is equally valid in terms of attempt, not equally valid in terms of final product (a subtle distinction).
The atheist says the mountain (objective morality) does not exist and that each tribe's attempts together can be taken to be morality as commonly understood. However, this changes when the next four tribes come down and try the drawing game again.
The believer says that right and wrong does exist objectively, that people groups or tribes have some understanding of it, but only when people truly encounter God (in heaven) do they truly know right and wrong.
This is not a perfect analogy and has a lot of holes in it but I hope it helps.
Simon
I have just thought of something after reading the mountain analogy - is part of what you were explaining that, regardless of what the actual definition of morality held by any individual or group, if we agree that we do hold morals at all it is evidence of a greater power (God / 'mountain')?
Interesting point Karen
Its not exactly what I meant
What I meant is that there are two ways of looking on morality - it is either "human made" or "not made by humans". If it is human made then in the analogy the mountain does not really exist - people just try and invent their own mountain. If it is not human made, but exists independently of humans, then the mountain really is there - morality, good or evil, exists independently of what humans think morality to be. This suggests to me that it has a source in God.
I would say that each culture's understanding of morality points towards there being a God but is not a proof of there being a God.
Its not easy to explan but hopefully when I talk about this tomorrow I should be able to make things a little clearer!
All good wishes
SImon
Your talk on morality: G.d is the 'out there beyond human grasp' or what I would call the 'given' (like the analogy of rain)objective from whence morality springs. But humans may put a subjective interpretation on how they deal with moral issues. is this a selective picking and choosing of what suits the protagonist's argument? Or is it 'horse and carriage'. Which given the human participation makes morality subjective. Now, the blog comment. You say "like the 10 Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount". That is, similarly to the 'objective or subjective' argument,(but different content in a sense) this is taking the moral standards from both the O.T. and the N.T. Paul of Tarsus would say that (sic) Christians should take the teaching of Jesus (and by rote the synoptic gospels and etc) as the New Church, putting aside the trappings of the old (Judaism). Therefore is it incorrect for a Christian to include the '10' in his standard or for a Jew to denounce the 'Sermon' simply because it is not part of the Hebrew Scriptures? If you agree with with the evolution theory of morality being suseptible to change, the answer would be "no", and apparently Christians say "no" too. They are being subjective not objective even though the Christian teaching comes through a link to G.d via His Son i.e. 'given'. n.b. I am sorry I can't seem to sign in with my name - but I'm sure you know this anon is Linda!
Dear Linda
Thank you for your comments.
I have emailed Peter S Williams, the writer of the Case for God for guidance here as he is a lot brainier than I.
He has emailed me back and hear is his reply. Its getting quite hard for me to follow some of this - I am not as intelligent as either you or him!
Here is his wording now.....
Dear Simon,
nice to hear form you - I think I would make the following brief responses, which I hope scratch the correct itch!
1) The central question here is not whether any individual or group has a true grasp of objective values, but whether there are any objective values for anyone to grasp or fail to grasp! If there are, and if such values couldn't exist without a transcendent, personal being to 'ground' them, then such a being must exist, This is the moral argument for God - it is of course not an argument for Christian Theism, but only an argument for theism.
2) I would be careful about claiming that God is beyond human grasp, since this appears to be a proposition that claims to grasp something about God! I would, rather, claim that God is not wholly beyond human grasp - but he is beyond human comprehension. There is a distinction between understanding something and comprehending it. I understand, to some extent, how this computer I am typing on works; but I don't comprehend it. Likewise with God. I understanding truthfully, in part, 'through a glass, darkly'!
3) Jesus said that the ten commandments were an unpacking of the imperative to love God with all one's being and to love one's neighour as oneself - one can view them as second order moral commands which supervein upon the first order moral command given by Jesus.
4) The philosophical trouble with any list of do's and don'ts (the so-called 'dentological' approach to ethics) is that a) it has a tendancy to focus one on the externals of conformity to a set of instructions, and b) one can often imagine situations in which one command comes into conflict with another, and the list itself gives one no guidence in such a situation. e.g. I am commanded not to lie, but also I am commanded not to take life (and, by extention, to protect life); so - as the now standard moral question goes - what should I do if my government asks me to point out any people I know so that they can kill them? Should I lie to protect life, or be honest and let someone die? This is where realising that moral values are grounded in the character of an all-good God helps us to see that since there can be no conflict in the coherent nature of the personal ground of morality (God), so there can be no conflict between second order moral values - the problem lies in the non-comprehensive nature of our subjective grasp of what the first order moral value of God's character entails in the detail of our contingent situation (i.e., just because moral value is objective doesn't mean we find it easy to know what the right thing to do is all the time!).
Hence, one reasons that the duty to protect the innocent is of over-riding importance compared to the duty not to lie.
One could attempt to add this fact to the rule book, as it were, by inserting a third order rule to this effect. But then one would have to do this for every instance of apparent conflict, and the rule book becomes very big and unwieldy!
On the other hand, one can focus more on the first order ground of value - which entails these second, and third order commands - that is, the character of God, who 'is love', and upon the 'virtue ethics' approach of character formation. The more one's character is shaped after the likeness, or 'image' of the God who 'is love', the more 'second-nature' it becomes to make the right moral choice from the ground up, rather than from the top-down as it were - this is, I think, one aspect of the Christian notion of sanctification, of 'putting on Christ'.
As Augustine said, 'Love God, and do what thou wilt' - because IF one loves God, THEN one will only want to do what he wants. In point of fact, I suppose that both bottom-up and top-down approaches to morality form a mutually re-inforcing whole, a virtuous hermenutical spiral. Our finite, fallen natures mean we have imperfect and incomplete subjective grasps both of God's first order character - the ground of objective moral value - and of the consequent second/third order moral values that flow as a consequence from it - but each can help us to get a better grasp of the other.
In short, when one recognizes the distinction between the bottom-up, first order, ground of objective value in God's character, virtue ethics (santification) approach to ethics, and the 'top down', 'here are the rules of thumb that do a good job of begining to cash out in a way easily grasped by finite humans the second order commands and/or duties which flow from the first-order duty to 'be like God, who is perfect' and who 'is love' - then one can perhaps get a better grasp of what Jesus meant when he said that he had not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it.
Somewhat off the top of my head - but I hope it helps!! Feel free to copy and paste!
All the best, Peter S. Williams
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