Dan Barker, the former fundamentalist minister-turned-atheist, and now president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, has recently written his most recent book, Mere Morality, in which he attempts to not only explain morality through purely naturalistic means, but also argue that morality stemming from religion (or more precisely Christianity) is actually immoral and evil. Recently, I had the pleasure to debate Mr. Barker at the university at which I teach. Although the entire debate did not focus solely on the topic of morality, it was nonetheless one of the issues we discussed.
In the posts that follow, I will determine whether or not Barker’s Mere Morality passes the test, not only of morality, but of logic and reason. In this post, though, I want to share my thoughts and answers that I gave in the debate to one of the debate questions. Truth be told, it was my first debate, and I severely over-prepared, especially for the first two questions. Consequently, I had too much and didn’t get through it all.
1. Is morality derived from a transcendent standard?
There are two fundamental things to note when it comes to this question. First, the Bible/Torah does not provide a transcendent standard, universal moral law. It should not be viewed as some kind of divinely-dictated rule book in which a megalomaniac, dictatorial God says, “Do what I say or else I’m going to burn your forever in hell!” That is a false caricature of the Bible. Unfortunately, though, that caricature is often pushed by Fundamentalist fire-and-brimstone preachers and the more militant atheists alike.
Second, our sense of morality is not a product of evolution; that is a fundamentally illogical claim. Evolution is a scientific/biological theory that describes the natural processes that have led to the various forms of life on earth. Science describes what nature, in fact, does—what is. Morality, though, describes what ought to be—some things are deemed morally right, and some things are deemed morally wrong.
The fact is, the very sense of morality is unique to human beings. We may share our biology with the rest of the natural world, but a sense of morality is uniquely human. That, in and of itself, points not only to the reality of God, but to the uniqueness of human beings as the image-bearers of God. But before I get ahead of myself, I need to give a little bit of a history lesson, for traditionally, discussions about morality often have been tied up together with discussions about reality itself.
Greek Philosophy: Universal Forms and Transitory Particulars
It was Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave that best illustrated the Greek concept of reality: the world of nature is the cave and particular material things in our world are nothing more than shadows of cut-out images. Simply put, what we see in this material world isn’t really real. By contrast, the real world outside the cave was the World of Forms—i.e. the non-material, transcendent world of perfection. In Plato’s allegory the sun in the World of Forms represented the “Form of the Good.” Of course, most people were chained up in the cave of the material world and were deceived into thinking that was the real world. The philosopher, though, was able to contemplate the World of Forms, and thus he was the most qualified to rule—what Plato called the Philosopher-King. But the point to be made here is simple: in Greek thinking, the real world was the transcendent, non-material world, whereas the material world was the less-real world. And hence our knowledge of the good, the beautiful, and the moral had to come from the transcendent World of Forms.
The Torah in OT Israel
Of course, the ancient Hebrews didn’t have a dualistic understanding of reality. They didn’t take a meat-cleaver between the material and transcendent worlds. Yes, God was not a material being; yes, he was purely spiritual; but no, he was not completely removed from this world. In fact, the Hebrews understood him as intimately active within it, most notably in the giving of the Torah. Unfortunately, many people today simply have a wrong concept of the Torah—i.e. a divinely-dictated rule book in which God has told all people for all time, “Obey my rules, or you’ll burn in hell!” That is not how the Hebrews understood the Torah at all.
I’ve written on this topic in my book review of John Walton’s Lost World of the Torah. In a nutshell, there are two things to recognize regarding the Torah. First, the Torah wasn’t imposed on the Hebrews. It was part of the stipulations they agreed to within the Mosaic covenant, which itself was essentially a Suzerain-Vassal treaty between themselves as the vassal and YHWH as the Suzerain. They would be His people, abide by the order laid out in the Torah, and would receive blessings.
Secondly, the legal material in the Torah was not modern, codified law. It sought to instruct the leaders how to rule and judge wisely according to that culture’s customs and traditions. It wasn’t trying to legislate some new kind of morality. It was describing what justice would look like within that culture and sought to teach wisdom in regard to how to reflect YHWH’s character, given those circumstances. The consequence is that the Torah was, in fact, more moral than the other laws and practices of other ancient Near Eastern people, but it wasn’t trying to dictate a whole new society. It largely worked from the general cultural realities of that time.
The New Testament and the Torah
By the time of Jesus and Paul, the typical Jewish attitude to the Torah had changed. 600 years earlier, the Jews had gone into exile precisely because they violated the covenant-treaty stipulations and thus suffered the curses laid out in the covenant. 70 years later, they miraculously came out of exile, back to the Promised Land. And many of the prophets of that time had prophesied that YHWH would bring them back to the land, that the Temple would be rebuilt, and that a Davidic messiah would rule a purified Israel and would rule over the nations. Well, those promises never really happened. And so, the Jews’ attitude toward the Torah was essentially this: “God hasn’t fulfilled those promises, because we aren’t keeping the Torah as well as we should.” And, especially in Pharisaic Judaism, the general sentiment came to be: “We need to prove to God we are good little boys and girls who can follow his rules before He will bless us again and fulfill his promises.” And therefore, Torah observance became viewed as a way to be moral and righteous.
You have to keep that in mind if you are going to understand how Jesus in the Gospels and Paul in his letters, particularly in Romans and Galatians, treated the Torah. It boils down to this: The Pharisaic view of the Torah as a divinely-dictated rule book that Jews had to obey in order to be righteous and in order to get God to love them was wrong. That was never the purpose of the Torah. The whole point of the Torah was to instruct people how to reflect God’s character in their culture—and to do that, it really came down to loving God and loving your neighbor as yourself. The Torah itself illustrated what loving God and loving your neighbor looked like in the ancient Near Eastern culture. And if you loved God and were instructed in the wisdom the Torah sought to impart, you would be more like God, reflect his character by loving your neighbor, and that would guide you as you sought to reflect God’s character in any different culture you might find yourself in.
Paul said that the Torah was never intended to make one moral and righteous, and anyone who sees it as a moral rule book to impose on others—that person is, in fact, turning the Torah into an oppressive idol. To use Pauline language, that person is “walking in the flesh” and brings divisions and oppression to others. By contrast, the work of the Holy Spirit brings unity, wisdom, maturity in Christ. And when you are mature in Christ and model your life after Christ, you are able to live out and reflect the character of God. And when you do that, you realize that morality flows out of a love for God and a love for others; it doesn’t reside in obsessive rule-keeping.
To use a brief example: a husband who loves his wife is going to be faithful to her and care for her, not because “the rules in the Bible” tell him he has to, but because he loves her. When you love God and love others, “the rules” become irrelevant, because you don’t need them—your morality is rooted in a love of God and a love of others; not a childish and slavish obsession to “keep the rules” so God will reward you.
Fast Forward to the Enlightenment
If we fast forward to the Enlightenment and 19th century philosophy, we see a radical shift occurred regarding assumptions about reality and, subsequently, notions of morality. Greek philosophy viewed the transcendent World of Forms as giving meaning to the natural World of Particulars, but that knowledge was only able to be accessed by philosophers. The biblical view was that yes, God was transcendent, and yes wisdom and morality are rooted in His character; but He had made Himself known within His created order, first through the Torah, and then fully in the person of Christ. To paraphrase the prologue of John: The universal Word became a particular person in the natural world of the flesh, and that particular person has made the universal Word fully known.
But Enlightenment philosophy completely flipped the script when it came to understanding reality and morals. To Enlightenment philosophers, it was the natural world of particulars that was “really real,” and the transcendent spiritual world that was, well, probably not real, but it’s okay to believe in it in your own private belief. And so, by denying the reality of the transcendent world, Enlightenment philosophers pointed to “nature” as the source of morality—they had to, for they essentially said that the material world is all that really exists. They said that one didn’t need a “divinely-dictated morality rule book” to know what was moral. Sure, there might be a Creator God somewhere else in the universe, but he isn’t directly involved in life here on earth. Therefore, one just had to look to nature and use science and reason to figure out what was right and wrong. Just as the natural world had “natural laws,” so too was morality a matter of “natural law.” The more you “got back to nature,” the more moral and happier you would be.
But then people like the Marquis de Sade and Robespierre started taking such claims to their logical conclusion: if morality is simply a matter of nature, then nature has made men stronger than women, and therefore it is okay for men to rape and torture women for their own pleasure. That, along with the bloody massacre that was the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror, caused a lot of 19th century philosophers and thinkers to pump the brakes on that notion that morality is derived from nature alone. And that gave rise to the notion that religion and the Bible are good for teaching morals and how to be proper, nice, and “moral”—but that sort of stuff should be kept in the realm of private belief and “faith.” Leave it to science and reason to deal with the real world; through science and reason, we can create a better world.
Basically, the result looked like this: private faith and religion (even though it isn’t really real) is good for morality (at least for now), but science and reason deal with the real world, that’s the ticket to progress forward.
Enter Friedrich Nietzsche and Soren Kierkegaard: Here Comes the Hammer
To get straight to the point, both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard (albeit in their different ways) savaged such an Enlightenment notion and exposed that way of thinking for the absurd farce it was. I am going to focus on Nietzsche.
On one hand, Nietzsche hated Christianity and saw Christians as weak and delusional. They clung to their Bibles like a moral rule book and, despite the bloody chaos that life really is, deluded themselves into thinking that “God has a plan” and “Everything will turn out all right in the end.” Nietzsche called that way of thinking the Will to Truth, and the morality that stemmed from it as slave morality. It is the illusion of weak people who cannot accept reality and who attempt to impose their illusion of a ready-made truth on others, regardless of the reality of the circumstances of life.
At the same time, though, Nietzsche didn’t think much about the 19th century deistic Enlightenment philosophers either. They may give lip-service to the notion of a deistic God somewhere, but in reality, they simply clung to their “science and reason” as if they were guides for morality. Nietzsche saw that as no different than Christians who clung to their Bibles as a moral rule book. In both cases, Nietzsche said, those people weren’t owning up to the reality that life is chaotic and meaningless. Nietzsche’s famous line, “God is Dead,” comes from his book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra—and that line is spoken by a madman: “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him! How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves?”
Simply put, Nietzsche’s “death of God” was a slap in the face to the Enlightenment worldview. He was saying, “If you deny the reality of God (i.e. the transcendent world), then the logical conclusion must be that life is meaningless and that there is no ready-made morality or purpose in life.” To Nietzsche, the Enlightenment narrative of the inevitable progress of humanity by means of science and reason was just another philosophical crutch that blinded people to the truth uttered by his madman: they had killed God with their faith in science and reason yet were foolishly trying to retain a sense of Christian morality. They were insane. If you get rid of the Christian God, you have to reevaluate the very concept of morality and values. And that is precisely what Nietzsche tried to do…and he himself ended insane as well.
Conclusion
What all this boils down to when it comes to discussing morality is this:
1. Philosophical discussions about morality have always seemed to go back to some kind of relationship between the natural world and some sort of transcendent world.
2. We should not think of morality as being derived from some sort of divinely-dictated moral rule book, and we shouldn’t see the purpose of the Bible/Torah that way. Unfortunately, that is the way most people view the Bible—as a moral rule-book.
3. We should not think that morality is derived from or rooted in “nature.” We should realize that appeals to science and evolutionary theory as a way of providing a “natural explanation” for morality not only fail and do not work, but they are, to quote Nietzsche, just another form of the Will to Truth and slave morality.
4. Biblically-speaking, morality is not presented in terms of rule-keeping. It is addressed as flowing out of the character and image of God. It demands the cultivation of wisdom to seek to how to reflect the character and image of God in whatever culture or moral system one finds oneself in. And, specifically in the New Testament, the claim is that God’s Wisdom is revealed in the person of Jesus Christ and that righteousness, morality and ethics are lived out by the empowerment of the Holy Spirit. Simply put the source of morality is found in the person of Christ and the very character of God—not a “rule-book” and not in “nature.”
Admittedly, if you are a philosophical materialist, all that sounds absurd. But you have to realize that if you reject the notion of the reality of the transcendent and the spiritual, you are forced with having to give material explanations for morality—something that is not material and something that is unique to human beings. And that, according to Nietzsche, defines the insanity of his Madman who proclaimed, “God is dead.”
I am trying to follow you, but if you claim that Scripture does not contain moral rules, then how about not committing murder or adultery? Those sure seem to be moral rules, what do you call them?
What I’m saying is that the ORIGIN of morality isn’t in the Torah. When the Hebrews were first given the Torah, no one said, “What? We’re not allowed to murder?” Having a sense of morality is part of what it means to be human. The Torah is like the Constitution–the founding document of the new nation. Of course it reflects the morality and customs of the ancient Near East, but it doesn’t invent a new morality out of the blue. For example: in the ANE, slavery was just an institution. The Torah isn’t going to say, “Okay, I want a 21st century democratic society NOW!” GIVEN that reality of ANE institutional slavery, the Torah outlines what justice looks like within that system. And when you compare the Torah’s stance on slavery with other ANE culture’s system, it IS more moral; the same can be said regarding treatment of women.
But the GENERAL moral outlook and culture one finds in the Torah is reflective of the ANE culture of which Israel was a part. The legal material in the Torah isn’t trying to legislate a whole new morality. It is seeking to instruct Israelite leaders how to use their wisdom in bringing about justice and reflecting God’s character within that culture.
It is kind of like what we see with Paul in his comments about women being submissive to their husbands, or slaves to their masters. In the Greco-Roman world, it was a deeply patriarchal culture where women had virtually no rights. Paul had now power to change those institutions. But he could teach believers what God’s character would look like within those institutions: i.e. Husbands loving their wives and caring for them–that was quite a revolutionary thing in the Greco-Roman mindset; Masters treating their slaves with compassion and respect–again, revolutionary. The INSTITUTIONS weren’t changed, but the Christ-honoring actions changed the whole moral calculus, to where the early Church reflected God’s character within those Greco-Roman institutions.
Perhaps I can put it this way: God’s aim has always been to create a PEOPLE for His Name who reflect his character, regardless of the culture or society in which they find themselves. And if they do reflect His character, that influence will certainly be borne out in the morals of that society; but the purpose of the Torah isn’t to create some sort of “perfect moral utopia system.” Or to put it another way, you don’t “become moral” because you obey a rule that says “Don’t murder.” If you love God and love your neighbor and are empowered by the Spirit, you don’t need that rule because you’re not going to murder anyone anyway.
God’s Moral Law would exist even if it weren’t “codified” in the Torah. Could this be what Paul is alluding to in Romans 2: 14-15 when he says that “Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them.”?
Pax.
Lee.
Since I didn’t directly address this in my newest post, let me say this. Basically yes. Paul’s point is that merely HAVING the Torah didn’t make one necessarily moral and righteous. Jews had the Torah but some didn’t keep it; some did. Gentiles didn’t have the Torah, yet still some pretty much kept it; some didn’t. When Paul says, the “requirements of the law is written on their hearts,” that is Holy Spirit language, and thoroughly eschatological, going back to the promise of a New Covenant in Jeremiah, when God would “write the Torah on their hearts”–it is the Spirit who does that.
So basically, Paul is acknowledging that true moral living doesn’t come from having the Torah or being obsessed with rule-keeping. Rather, it comes from having a heart that has been transformed by the Holy Spirit.
Joel, I am confused. It seems that you are saying that morality is indeed transcendent, but there is no codified list. You say we should reflect Christ in our day to day actions. But there are many people who are followers of Jesus that do not agree on what constitutes a moral action in a given situation. In fact, some Christians would call the actions of other Christians immoral. So, how do we resolve these conflicts if there is no “list” to go to for clarification? It would seem to me that in any given situation, there are certain actions that God would consider moral and others he would consider immoral. So, how do we tap into the mind of God to determine these?
I’ve gotten a number of comments/questions on this topic (both in this post and the other Walton posts on the Torah). I might have to write a additional post on this topic of morality, Torah, etc. to try to clarify a few things. Let’s see if I get on a roll tonight after Elliot goes to sleep.