Go and Sin no More
Let’s talk about sin. We don’t talk about sin enough, I’ve noticed. We’re very slack that way. Very lax. Very slothy and loose and – well – sinful. So let’s give it a look-see.
First let’s see what a godless philosophy type has to say about it.
…ideas of right and wrong can be entirely separated from ideas of what is sinful. Aristotle, for example, thought of good and bad in terms of what allowed human beings to flourish as rational animals, with no reference to God’s will. Whereas sin separates us from the divine, doing wrong separates us from our true natures or our fellow humans.
Got it. Okay. Sin separates us from the divine, so for those of us who don’t think the divine is actually there (or divine if it is there, in fact if it is there it’s a right bastard, so separation from it is just what we want, as far off as possible, please), sin separates us from an empty signifier, so it turns out we don’t need to talk about it much, because there’s nothing much to talk about. Got it. Now let’s see what a goddy type has to say about it.
Julian Baggini’s article on sin (G2, May 9) misunderstands the significance of sin. There is in fact no distinction to be made between doing something contrary to God’s will, and doing something contrary to our own good. The Aristotelian guiding principle of human happiness, to which Baggini refers, is not intrinsically without reference to God’s will – if human beings have been created by God, then the happiness of the rational animal will involve conformity to God’s will, as only God can satisfy the human body and soul.
Yes, ‘if’. Certainly, ‘if’. Of course, ‘if’. But that’s just it. If. You think the answer to the question implicit in that ‘if’ is yes, but others of us think it is no, so it’s slightly pointless to re-inform us of what follows from answering yes when we in fact answer no. The people who answer yes mostly already take your point (sort of, more or less, perhaps with some leeway), but you’re addressing Julian and the rest of us no-sayers, on whom your argument is wasted, because it relies so heavily on that ‘if’. In fact since our answer to the implicit question is No, we tend to think that the putative conformity to God’s will is in fact conformity to what a long line of church boffins and theocrats have asserted God’s will to be, and we prefer not to conform to that, thanks.
I’m not quite sure that this letter writer *was* speaking to unbelievers. She sounds as though she is taking for granted that the truth-value of the antecedent of her conditional is T, and that even unbelievers, for some strange reason, would agree. In fact, I believe that she thinks her antecedent is self-evidently true. She is apparently only interested in pointing out to Mr. Baggini that the conditional is true.
But actually, I’m not so sure that it is, necessarily. Suppose that God had created human beings to be unhappy (which seems on the face of it as likely as the contrary assumption). Then a rational person (who presumably wants to be happy) would need to *disobey* God’s will.
Yes, well she gets to that at the end of her letter –
“To reject God’s will is not to reject the arbitrary rule of a tyrant, but to reject the most loving overtures of the creator who has made us for the only lasting happiness, eternal happiness with him.”
But of course the same problem applies. That’s not as self-evidently true as Helen Brown appears to think it is.
Yes, Socrates did, or Plato said he did anyway. In the Phaedo. Very useful.
If something is good because god says so, what if god says you should torture all the slaves? Etc.
Does Plato write about this in the Phaedo as well? I’ve only read this argument in (and taught it from) the Euthyphro. [Honest question. I simply haven’t read the Phaedo, so have no idea what might be lurking in it.]
I still like the Gnostic Heresy the best: God’s a twisted little brat, the “God of this World” and the flaws of creation merely reflect his flawed nature.
Um! Probably not, G – I probably got it wrong.
Tsk – idiot. Sure enough, I got it wrong. Meant the Euthyphro. Prat.
Ah, but to play the devil’s — or the creator’s – advocate, isn’t the next move to evoke Pascal’s wager? Yes, the fool says in his heart that there is no god. But does the fool concede that there might be a god? And that is when you start iffing around.
Of course, the problem is that by iffing your way to God, you might be f-ing up your life, since it would seem that there is no substance to this wager, and the behavioral changes demanded by your bet by the theocrat certainly don’t seem entailed by the ontololgical question. To tell you the truth, I see no reason for thinking that, if there is a God, I am morally worse than him/her. Why shouldn’t I be morally better? I certainly have never chopped off the head of my father, which Zeus did, or committed the carnal act with a swan (yes, it’s a drab life). As for Jehovah, I know that I, at least, have never ordered the slaughter of every man, woman and child in any town or city, at least while sober. And I’m so opposed to drowning the whole world that I’m for much stronger versions of the Kyoto treaty. So, I figure that, if anything, God might take a few moral lessons from me.
Well, take the god Christians believe in. If you use him as a model for your behaviour, you’ll soon find yourself behind bars or in a loony bin or on Death Row. Somebody must surely already have done some clinical psychological profiling of god, based on the biblical descriptions of his actions and come up with some nasty conditions from which he can be said to be suffering. (“So, tell me something about your childhood.” “That’s just it. I never had one. I’ve always been here, completely omni-everything, never had any chance to develop.”
Somebody must surely already have done some clinical psychological profiling of god
Indeed they have:
Bipolar, or manic-depressive, disorder is a condition that afflicts millions. Characterized by cycles of elation followed by bouts of profound depression and despair, the disorder can wreak havoc on both the sufferer and his or her loved ones, particularly if it goes undetected and untreated for an extended period. Though the condition is estimated to affect, in one form or another, 5 percent of the world’s population, Monday marks the first time it has been diagnosed in a major deity.
From The Onion. (Where else?)
Carl Gustav Jung?
Lucky for us Baggini doesn’t have to argue the point with Aristotle (whom in any case he doesn’t understand well):
“Not every problem, nor every thesis, should be examined, but only one which might puzzle one of those who need argument, not punishment or perception. For people who are puzzled to know whether one ought to honour the gods by teleology; as the ultimate final causeand love one’s parents or not need punishment [kolasis, “pruning,” correction], while those who are puzzled to know whether snow is white or not need perception.” (Topics I 105a3ff. Pickard-Cambridge trans.)
No, the god of Aristotle does not will or command, and so its commands can’t be trangressed: “God is not a ruler in the sense of issuing commands, but is the End [hou heneka, for-the-sake-of-which, final cause] as a means to which wisdom gives commands. … since clearly God is in need of nothing.” Eudemian Ethics VII 1249b13ff, Loeb Classical Library trans.) Aristotle doesn’t have as elaborate an idea of natural law as the Stoics, but, arguing that the polis should not be too large, he ascribes cosmic order to his god: “Law is a form of order, and good law must necessarily mean good order; but an excessively large number cannot participate in order: to give it order would surely be a task for divine power, which holds even this universe together.”(Politics 1326a30ff) Aristotle’s ontology notoriously includes his god, the best thing there is (Metaphysics XII).
He deems an established cultus a primary necessity for the best polis (1328b12f), with priesthood only for citizens of venerable age. The philosopher’s life, the best life and that chosen by Aristotle himself, is the most godlike (Nicomachean Ethics X 1178b7ff and 117913ff.) It is futile to invoke Aristotle’s naturalism as if it squared with present-day tendentious godlessness, since his nature is to be explained above all by teleology and his god is the ultimate final cause of everything, most of all the good insofar as it is good.
I regret that a stray paste destroyed the quotation’s intelligubility. Here it is:
Not every problem, nor every thesis, should be examined, but only one which might puzzle one of those who need argument, not punishment or perception. For people who are puzzled to know whether one ought to honour the gods and love one’s parents or not need punishment [kolasis, “pruning,” correction], while those who are puzzled to know whether snow is white or not need perception.” (Topics I 105a3ff. Pickard-Cambridge trans.)