The Billy Pulpit

I’ve written a number of posts here about the source of morality; mostly because I no longer believe that our sense of morality is given to us by God (or to put it another way, I don’t believe that without god there is no right and wrong). I think our sense of right and wrong has an anthropological or evolutionary explanation, which I’m coming around to gradually. In order to support that contention I’ve looked at various defenses of morality (as being religion-based, God-given or the like), and raised what I think are pretty good arguments against each position. But maybe the wrinkle is free will. Maybe we DO have an innate, God-given sense of morality, but competing with that is free will. We are able to look at each situation, weigh it against our desires, aspirations and preconceived notions and then decide what to do; free will then, is what allows us to override the moral code God has given us. This tension between what we want to do and what we know is right (from our innate sense of morality) could explain why we struggle with morality.

Before we get into that however, let’s take a look at the notion of free will. On the surface that makes no sense; a basic concept of free will seems to be pretty much ingrained in our thought processes. Of course we have free will! We’re not programmed robots, after all. We can consider several courses of action in any given situation and decide what to do; that’s free will.

It turns out however, that philosophers have argued the question of whether free will even exists for over 2,000 years, with no clear answer. So I’m not going to pretend to try to come up with an answer that’s eluded people for two millennia, nor even to add significantly to the debate. But it IS an interesting question, once you start digging into it. On one hand, it seems intuitive and obvious that we can decide what to do, and that’s how to define free will. On the other hand, when we look around us, virtually every event has a cause. If there’s a fire in the kitchen and a house burns down, we assume that something caused the fire; it didn’t just happen. Thus, cause and effect drives everything. Yet when it comes to us as humans we say that process stops. We believe we override cause and effect by our choices, which are the result of deliberation and decisions we make. Yet, think about this: I have done things that, afterwards, I wonder why I did it. I seemed compelled in some way to do something contrary to my wishes. Or I tried to blame some external factor. “I don’t know what I was thinking; that’s just not like me!” I suppose you could say that I COULD have done otherwise, so I still had free will; I just chose not to exercise it. But that seems like not confronting the reality of the situation: I felt like I was not really choosing what to do, but more reacting to external causes.

Cause…and effect. And yet, something about this doesn’t feel right. I can’t yet defend it completely, but I just feel that we have free will; that we control out destiny.

Either way, I don’t believe that the notion of free will explains our struggle with morality. I’ll explain why in the next posting.

Amid all these thoughts about where morality comes from, it strikes me that I haven’t written anything about why I think it even matters. As long as we have a sense of right and wrong, it keeps us out of trouble (mostly) and it allows us to get along in the world, what difference does it make how it got here?

This question is important to me from two perspectives. First and probably most important (again, at least for me) is that anything as foundational as our sense of morality should be open to examination. Not just “what” is morally right or wrong, but “what makes it so?” When I was a kid growing up as one of Jehovah’s witnesses in north central Illinois, questions like this simply never came up. I “knew” that all the answers I needed were in the Bible; if they weren’t, they weren’t important. (I’ve heard this line of reasoning used in both Christian and Muslim historical accounts as a rationale for dismissing scientific inquiry. I suggest this is specious reasoning, but I digress!) When I had a question requiring some kind of weighing of alternatives, I’d go to the Bible for the answer. Or probably more specifically, I’d go to the Watchtower’s Society’s literature which would point me to the appropriate scripture. (Looking back, I wonder at this attitude of acceptance; today I can’t imagine this lack of critical thinking, but at the time it simply didn’t occur to me to question any further. Critical thinking is another blog post though.)

Then one day I started thinking about what I had simply accepted without question up until then. It started with a particular line of reasoning that went something like:

1. I’m one of a relatively small group of people who enjoy God’s exclusive favor (or so I thought).
2. The reason I’m in this group is because my Dad is. This is true in most cultures: people tend to stay in the belief system in which they were raised. If he had stayed a Methodist I would have been raised a Methodist.
3. Thus, an accident of birth determined that I received God’s favor.

Seems kind of capricious of God, doesn’t it?

It goes beyond that three-step logic chain, but in any case the more I thought about what I believed and why, the more questions were raised. The exact process is for other posts, but what I’m getting to is I no longer just accept things “because.” Important beliefs not only should be open to question, I would suggest they MUST be questioned.

The second issue for me is the knee-jerk reaction I get from people who say “If there is no god, why be a good person?” I know lots of highly moral atheists and agnostics (in fact, in many cases they seem to me to have a higher sense of morality than many “Christians” I know!), so this line of reasoning seems counter to my personal observations. If the justification for being a moral person doesn’t necessarily come from God, where DOES it come from?

It seems a reasonable question to examine.

OK, let’s take another run at this. Do we get our morality from God, and then corrupt it because of our inherent imperfection?

In earlier posts I argued that morality doesn’t come from religion or God. I reasoned that if morality comes from religion, which religion? There are hundreds of versions of Christianity each with their own concepts of what constitutes morality, and they can’t all be correct; so that would seem to rule out the vast majority of religions as the source of morality. Of course each religion believes theirs is The One, but the fact that there’s more overlap than differences seems to indicate that religions per se aren’t the source of morality, but something higher; in other words, maybe religions are taking their cue from some other source. That source would logically be “god,” of course.

So maybe religions interpret what God intends, but they do so imperfectly. That would allow for God to be the ultimate source of morality, with imperfect interpretation by humans, kind of like Plato’s metaphor of the cave; what we see is an imperfect and ill-focused version of the “real.” OK then; but if true, wouldn’t it make sense that God would not allow for misinterpretation? For example, if you’re a parent, wouldn’t it make sense to be crystal clear on instructions to your children, especially on important matters? And if we, as imperfect humans, see the importance of clarity, wouldn’t God (in whose image we’re told we were made) be even more aware of this? And yet we all struggle to understand how to live a moral life; so I argued that if God was in fact the source of morality, he did a pretty poor job of communicating some critically important instructions to us. If our relationship with Him is dependent upon doing His will, but we don’t know for sure what that is (at least in the context of what is “moral”), how can we really be held accountable for our actions? And yet it seems clear from the Bible that we are held accountable; some even believe that what we do in our lives could conceivably condemn us to torment for all eternity (although I never bought that!) In any case, it seems to follow that our sense of morality would be much more clear if it were truly God-given. (This is just one of several lines of reasoning on this subject.)

One response to that is we were given this sense of morality by god, but Satan and our own imperfection has clouded our minds. This is essentially what I was taught as a young JW. (It’s a very Manichean belief system!) And it naturally followed that we shouldn’t think for ourselves, but should rely on the standards set out in the Bible to tell us what was right and wrong. And since the Bible is pretty confusing and doesn’t deal with things going on now (the Internet, birth control, celebrating birthdays and whether or not to agree to a blood transfusion, as specific examples), we were told on one hand to accept the Bible, but on the other hand to “not put too much emphasis on our own understanding of it.” In other words, it’s best to let the leaders in Brooklyn tell us what to do; they should interpret the Bible for us. And if you’d prefer, substitute the Pope, Joel Osteen or Jim and Tammy Faye for the Governing Body of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society in Brooklyn and you’ve got the same concept: as imperfect humans we should not depend upon our own moral compass but should let other, presumably smarter or more “holy” folks do it for us.

Well, setting aside the whole Jim and Tammy Faye thing, does it make sense that we can’t really judge morality for ourselves due to our “fallen state?” Let’s say the answer is “yes.” Then we’re back to the same question: how could the personification of love (God) continue to hold us accountable? If we can’t possibly know what’s moral, it makes no sense that we would be in peril of God’s wrath for not being able to follow a moral code that’s murky at best and outright contradictory at worst.

So again, the issue is the same: if God is going to hold us accountable, then why is it not more clear what constitutes a moral life? We shouldn’t have such a hard time figuring it out!

I have a question that’s been bumping around in my head for a while.

Over the past 20 years or so, there’s been a resurgence of support for fundamentalist Christian theology in the United States, especially in politics. I believe it’s well accepted that the Religious Right got Dubya elected; the fact that he then abandoned virtually every promise he made to them to get their support is irrelevant (see “Tempting Faith” by David Kuo—he was second in command of Bush’s “Office of Faith-Based Initiatives” from 2001 to 2003; in his book he voices his opinion that the office was mostly smoke and mirrors and that none of the initiatives he was supposed to promote actually got put into action). And today I think it’s safe to say that any candidate who doesn’t express a deep and abiding faith has a short political future.

Where does this come from? In Europe, a candidate’s religious beliefs are almost never even brought up; talk to a few people from the Continent (or even the UK, Canada or Australia) and they express mystification over this religiosity rampant in US politics. And not just politics (although that’s where it’s perhaps most visible); school systems are being pressured to teach creationism and a “young earth” view as an alternative to evolution, even though there’s nearly unanimous agreement among earth scientists that evolution is established fact. (The arguments over why it’s called a “theory” when most scientists view it as established is the subject of another posting.)

And note here that I want to differentiate between religiosity and fundamentalism. What we’re seeing is not simply a desire to express faith, but a specific brand of Christianity. As is true in most of the major religions, Christians come in a number of different flavors, all the way from those who interpret the Bible literally, to the view that the Bible is simply a book of allegories and general guidelines for one’s life. The brand of Christianity that seems to be ascendant in politics today is fundamentalism, which takes the Bible as the literal word of God, and believes it should be viewed as historically accurate in every detail and used as a set of specific instructions on how to live our lives.

Fundamental Christianity has interesting roots in the US. In the mid- to late-1800’s a number of religions developed an attitude of activism around politics; they felt that it was their duty to bring Christian values to the country by becoming a part of the political system. Evidently the Biblical mandate to be “in the world but not of it” was superseded by the desire to change society to match their ideal vision. At the time this was a splinter view; today it seems to have taken over as the majority position.

So why is it that this activist attitude continues today? And is there something unique about our society here in the United States that allows, or even promotes this attitude? As you might anticipate, I have some thoughts about that; so stay tuned.

OK, Morality: Part Three.

So we all have a sense of right and wrong. Or most of us anyway, and those who lack that sense are considered abnormal (sociopaths, or at the farthest end of that aberration, psychopaths). In any case, it’s considered “normal” to have a sense of morality. So where does this come for? Many would say it comes from our religion and originates with God. I’ve already written that I don’t think it comes from religion; if that were the case then why don’t we have as many moral codes as there are religions? (Read “The source of morality, parts 1 and 2” in this blog). But maybe looking at religion is the wrong way of going about it. I have argued that religion is just each person’s attempt to understand their connection to god (or God), and as such, is fallible. So let’s go a step higher, bypass religion, and consider that morality comes from God.

Well then, if that’s the case, then how would the concepts of morality get transmitted to each of us? If it’s not through religion, then maybe we had this “put into us;” in other words we’re hard wired for morality. That seems to make sense, given the universality of a sense of right and wrong. But then the question becomes did this come from God, or is it possible there’s another mechanism? Those who believe in God will tell you the answer is obvious: God created us that way; end of story. But if that’s true, why do we wrestle so much with moral dilemmas? If God gave us our moral code, wouldn’t that mean there would be no ambiguity? The “right thing to do” would be obvious in each situation, wouldn’t it? I’m not a parent, but if I were, I would not allow for any ambiguity in my instructions to a child; I’d say “do this” or “don’t do that” with as much clarity as possible. I would think that if it were important enough for God to build this into us, then it would work pretty reliably; more or less like the sense of direction works for migratory birds, spawning salmon, etc. No failures, wrong turns or the like; it’s unfailing. So if God were to give us our morality it seems it would be absolutely reliable. But that’s not what we see; pose a moral dilemma to twenty people and you’ll likely get that many different answers. That doesn’t seem like the way I was taught that God works. Particularly when so much is riding on it: get it wrong and you risk God’s wrath. Seems like something that important would be designed to work exactly the same for all of us.

So the bottom line here: if morality comes from God and we’re hard wired for it, then it seems like he did a pretty poor job of it, because we wrestle with it so much. That in itself should tells us it’s not a God-given, inherent process.

But wait! What about free will? Maybe God DID give us morality, but combine that with free will and presto! We have what we see around us: struggling with morality and moral dilemmas. That’s not really an answer however; that’s another blog entry. Stay tuned.