Old lines
[N]ew lines are being drawn in the debate between belief and non-belief. In short, the initial dispute appears to be exhausting itself and in its place, a more subtle discussion is emerging. The question is no longer simply, Does God exist? That has never admitted of a final answer anyway. Instead, it is this: What would it be like to live in a world without God?
Oh please. That’s not a new line, for god’s sake. It’s not as if nobody has wondered or discussed what it would be like to live in a world without God until now! The question has never been simply ‘does God exist?’; who said it was? On the other hand, an awful lot of people go around simply calmly assuming that God exists, and that we all agree that God exists, and that there is no reason to think God doesn’t exist, and that we all know who and what God is, and that we all know what God wants from us, so some people have recently been reminding the assumers that their assumptions are assumptions and that they’re rather silly and presumptuous. But that doesn’t rule out talking about what it would be like to live in a world without God, or for that matter talking about what it is like to live in a world without God, and it never has, so there’s no need to draw any new lines, the lines have been there for a long time.
If there is no longer any foundation for ethics, because there is no ultimate source of goodness, then human beings alone must choose how they will live. Some people will choose to be good. But others will not; they will choose to be evil. And it is not easy to say why they should not.
No, it is not, but that ‘ultimate source of goodness’ is not helpful either, because it is easy, but wrong. It is easy only in the sense that it ignores its own weakness.
“If there is no longer any foundation for ethics, because there is no ultimate source of goodness, then human beings alone must choose how they will live. Some people will choose to be good. But others will not; they will choose to be evil. And it is not easy to say why they should not.”
But if the ultimate source of ethics is a command from God, it is not easy to say why people should obey Him. Because of a threat of punishment? But those who do good to avoid harm to themselves are not being ethical, they are simply prudently looking out for their self-interest. The only truly ethical motive for treating people and animals well is empathy, compassion, desire for their happiness. God’s will makes no difference.
Is there some sort of conspiracy among theists to feign unawareness of the Euthyphro dilemma?
The need for GOD to be the “Ultimate Source of Goodness” is lazy. Ten differnet kinds of lazy. You don’t need to read Kant or Aristotle to know that ethics are a complex topic. But to simply give up on participating in a rigorous discussion about the concept is shameful.
Sadly, every hack coming to the defense of their God in an article about the “godbothering vs. godlessness” debate uses this blunt instrument to get past the need to craft a real arguemnt about the existence of God. Blerg.
Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche lived and wrote around 125 years ago about a world without God and its ethical implications, although from differing points of view, Dostoyevsky being a believer and Nietzsche being an atheist. So, if Mark Vernon thinks that he’s discovering something new, he is quite mistaken. He’s probably mistaken about many other things too.
Vernon :
That’s the Mark Vernon and Williams method: let’s ask a question. This question has a clear and obvious answer. We don’t like this answer. Let’s ask the same question in slightly different and more complicated terms and see how we can twist these.
To “decide what is good”, to “take responsibility when evil prevails” is part of “being good”. “Being good” is not merely “not being bad”, for in that case dead people would be “better” than live ones. As NB pointed out, when an atheist is “good”, he gives at least an answer to the first question (“me”) which is a lot more than the believer ever does convincingly.
Anyway I’d better stop now, the whole article stinks of wet straw and I am running out of quotation marks. ( I always found the use of concepts like good and, especially, “evil” extremely annoying. )
Hahaha Arnaud – well put.
woot – there seemss to be, doesn’t there. And along with conspiring to ignore the Euthyphro problem they conspire to ignore the Gnostic conundrum. What the hell makes them think ‘God’ is the ultimate source of goodness? What makes them think it’s not the ultimate source of badness?
I have a more serious question for this idiot: What value is your “Ultimate Force for Good” when those most committed (at least theoretically) to said force so repeatedly, thorughout history, use said ultimate truth to justify such evil?
Because we don’t see anymore how your “Ultimate Force for Good” does anything at all to control or direct the lives of the institutions and people most directly tied to said force.
The UFG is without any value. It accomplishes nothing.
Is Mark Vernon for real? It seems he is just trotting out this tripe because he has established a niche market. I think he’s actually smarter than this, which makes him reprehensible.
Wie viel irritierender kann dieser Mann werden?! He pretends to sit on the boundary between belief and non-belief, but he seems really to understand neither belief nor unbelief nor any stage between. This kind of empty headedness might do for the Vicar of Bray, but it won’t do for someone who pretends to understanding. At least the Vicar of Bray sequentially stood for someting. Vernon’s anodyne twaddle doesn’t say anything, but I believe he really thinks that others think it does.
Perhaps this is what religious believing comes to nowadays. On the one hand we have Jesus peering from a marminte tin, and on the other we have Rowan Williams pontificating on Dostoyevsky, as though the brothers Karamazov were the latest in pop-theology. Williams may be genuinely puzzled, and so may Dostoyevsky have been, as to how we are to live in a world without gods. But most people who do not believe got used to being good quite some time ago. The religious and the half-religious (like Vernon) don’t seem to have noticed.
Unlike Rose, I don’t think Vernon is smarter than this. If so, surely it would have become clear by now.
Well I think I’ve seen stuff smarter than this on his blog…But then I thought that about Brandon, too, and ended up thinking perhaps I’d imagined it.
“Is there some sort of conspiracy among theists to feign unawareness of the Euthyphro dilemma?”
Are you claiming that theists are failing to engage with the most sophisticated arguments of atheists? How very dare you! That’s their line.
On the basis of Vernon, one should be able to walk down a busy street and sort the believers from the non-believers just by visual evidence alone. The non believers will be having a hard time with ethical decisions, and will be busting into parked cars, snatching handbags from little old ladies, smashing shop windows, and dropping gum wrappers and cigarette butts all over the place. Well, at least with greater frequency, and regardless of sex.
The believers on the other hand will be identifiable by the way they roll their eyes heavenwards, as can be seen in those portrayed in mediaeval paintings and tapestries. The rolling of the eyes will relate both to their judgement of the behaviour of the obvious unbelievers, and to their thanks to the Almighty for having avoided such a fate.
Every so often, one or two believers will stand out a mile; they will have tears running down their faces and be intoning the mantra “I have sinned…”
As in: http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/february/21/newsid_2565000/2565197.stm
Judging from the personal behavior of the people who live in the most atheistic parts of the world, I conclude that it is very easy for atheists to figure out why they should be good. And to actually be good.
Vernon’s argument strikes me as navel-gazing tripe. The answers to his questions apparently are easily discernible to most atheists. He might not like those answers because they’re not mystical or faith-based enough, but they are nonetheless answers. There’s just not much mystery here.
What would it be like to live in a world without God?
I’d say “no different.” Back when verificationism was all the rage that would be taken as showing that theological claims were literally meaningless. But verification isn’t the thing these days so I think that as a Christian I can safely say: it makes no difference to the way the material world is whether or not God exists.
It doesn’t make any difference to the world whether Platonic forms or numbers exist either. That’s metaphysics for you. And theology is a subspecies of metaphysics.
But not making a difference to the material world is not quite the same thing as what it would be like to live in a world without God, is it? Aren’t those two different questions? At least, Vernon seems to be talking about a different question – but then clarity isn’t Vernon’s strong suit, so maybe he isn’t.
Good point. But I’d give the same answer to the other question if, as I take it, it has to do with the question of the foundation of ethics. God’s existence makes no difference.
Well, there’s the Euthyphro problem. Arguably God’s willing something can’t be what makes it good, so we’re back to go: God’s existence doesn’t make any difference.
I find normative ethics more interesting but there again religious believers are flying by the seat of their pants like everyone else. This isn’t something new: St. Paul worries about how to sort out the genuine moral injunctions in “the Law” from cultural or ceremonial rules that no longer apply. Conservative evangelicals today are also selective–don’t care that Jesus prohibited divorce but make a fuss about prohibitions on (male!) homosexuality in the Old Testament but don’t worry about Old Testament prohibitions on wearing mixed-fiber fabrics, etc.
My own weird view, which I’m now working out, is that the basis of ethics is sympathy with our counterparts at nearby possible worlds, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.
“Inevitably, the climax of The Ten Commandments flashed through his brain : Moses hurling the Tablets of the Law to the ground and thus depriving the Israelites of their moral compass, leaving them uncertain where God stood on adultery, theft and murder.”
James Morrow Towing Jehovah
Yeah – woot asked above, dryly, if there’s a conspiracy to ignore the Euthyphro problem. I didn’t mention it in the post only because I’ve mentioned it so many times in the past! I don’t want to sound like a broken record all the time.
Quite so, about the seat of the pants. Even the pope lets us see him doing that – there’s some secular reasoning, then some goddy reasoning with chapter and verse, then some more secular reasoning. Mix ‘n match. Cherry picking, just as you say.
That sounds like an interestingly eccentric view. I’ve always hated the idea of having an identical twin because there’s only one of me and it’s me. I bet I’m totally unsympathetic to counterparts at nearby possible worlds.