"On Truth and Lie in the Study of Christian Morality"

In the realm of the more empirical sciences, the last few centuries have seen Christianity in full-scale retreat. A whole host of what used to be fundamental claims have had to be thrown overboard by Christians themselves in order to keep their religion from being discredited completely- it has the feel of the work of Civil War era “sawbones” frantically lopping off entire limbs in order to avoid infection spreading to the core of the body.

Evolutionary biology, physics and cosmology have utterly destroyed the original biblical account of creation, forcing all but the most irrational believers (ahem...Ken Ham...) to recast the cosmological claims of the bible as metaphor. History and archeology have gradually undermined the claims of the Hebrew kingdom periods and have left the accounts of Jesus's life and supposed miracles in almost total doubt. Indeed, even the “mythicist” case arguing that there was no historical Jesus at all has been gaining ground in the last decade on the strength of re-analysis of historical evidence, going from an affectation of atheist cranks to a fairly strongly argued hypothesis (though I'm still not sold!).

The tools of sophisticated theology?

In those areas, then, where facts are continually accumulating and theories thus have at least some pressure towards improvement due to contact with those facts, we find the old “models” drawn from the Bible are losing out quickly and decisively. The claims in the bible simply don't match what we find when we examine the world around us.

However, this isn't nearly as much the case in the more abstract arenas of philosophy and ethical inquiry, at least until recently. Perhaps this is due to the fact that it's much easier to play games of language and rhetoric in these less empirically-bounded disciplines, combined with the fact that the insights of psychology and cognitive science (two currents that might help to keep the philosophical reveries from drifting into confusion) are both fairly new and extremely contentious.

Whatever the cause may be, the fact that William Lane Craig, an apologist for genocide and divine-command ethics, can stand in front of any audience and claim that only God can provide an “objective” moral standard without being laughed from the stage illustrates the point perfectly. I recommend reading the links in that previous sentence, and then comparing him with his argument that starts around 7:11 in this clip:

Simply unbelievable: an intelligent philosopher can argue that slaughtering defenseless women and children and taking young girls as rape-slaves is moral when God commands it in the OT, and then turn around and in front of a packed auditorium claim that there would be no way to know that rape was “really wrong” without God's injunction against it. I haven't seen as convincing a portrayal of split-personality disorder since Fight Club.

The entire debate with Austin Dacey is worth a watch. Craig fires his usual volley, presenting his “5 reasons” as if they made an interlocking case while trying to hide the many assumptions he slips in to paper over the gaps. Though Dacey can be a bit sleep-inducing, he makes some excellent points in his opening- points that Craig's rebuttal can barely touch. Of course, as usual, Craig's flow and clarity (as well as cute little tricks like not-quite-honest summaries of his opponent's positions!) makes him seem like the clear winner, especially to a casual viewer. No wonder Luke Muehlhauser over at Commonsenseatheism called Craig a “jedi master” debater (though one commenter mentioned that he's more of a Sith Lord!).

Ex-lesbians and broken watches

Lisa Miller:
Hating vaginas, loving God/kidnapping

Quite a few fair-minded cosmopolitans want religious groups (and religious individuals) to be able to “come to the table” when society decides what laws to enact and live by. Fair enough, perhaps, but many bristle at the idea that those participating should have to give reasons for recommending the policies they put forth, and evidence for those reasons. No joke, sadly. I’ve seen people recommend that religious groups be able to recommend a policy on the authority of their sacred text alone.

Let’s take the recent example of this AP press story, detailing how religious supporters have helped “ex-lesbian” Lisa Miller stay on the run with her kidnapped daughter. Lisa, turning evangelical (and then Mennonite!), escaped the clutches of Sappho's ghost and tore her daughter out of her previous life and away from the girl’s other mother. Of course

Mennonite pastors and other faith-based supporters may have helped hide the two in Nicaragua and are now coming to the aid of one who the FBI says helped Miller.

What’s more, pathetic justifications of Miller’s kidnapping are being pushed by these groups. They maintain that Miller’s crime is an example of “civil disobedience” in honor of God’s law.

"When Isabella was about 18 months old, Lisa Miller realized the emptiness of her lesbian lifestyle, and her mother's instinct alerted her to the danger that lifestyle posed for her young daughter. She chose to leave that lifestyle, repented of her immoral ways, and began a new life."

Of course, whether you’ll agree that this justification really is pathetic will depend on whether or not you agree that there was a “danger” posed by being raised with a gay parent. And what, pray tell, could make you agree with that? All claims that being gay or being around gays or being raised by “teh gaiz” is dangerous have been shown to be lies or distortions (except, of course, the danger to LGBT kids and LGBT families posed by irrational discrimination!). So what evidence remains? God’s eternal word, by golly!

Of course, most well-mannered commentators will see this as an indictment of the kind of religion that discriminates against gays, and not religion itself. As the liberal Christians and faith-loving atheists might put it, “Lisa Miller has the wrong idea about Christianity/religion/spirituality!” Of course, how it is that they were able to determine that the correct interpretation just happens to coincide with our current standards of secular human rights remains a mystery. Certainly it’s not from examining the Bible- dancing happily through that text and declaring all the nasty, discriminatory bits metaphorical while maintaining that all the passages about love, unity and coming-back-from-the-dead are true is a common but clearly ridiculous practice.

It amounts to this: if we could push a button and all varieties of religion would suddenly have the “correct” non-discriminatory position towards the LGBT community, this would not solve our problem. Even a religion whose morality exactly matches our hard-won, modern ideas about human rights isn’t worth a damn as an ethical/moral guide because of the process it uses to arrive at those moral conclusions. Not discriminating against someone on the basis of who they have sex with just because God told you so and not discriminating because there is no reason to do so are two very different positions that might, for a time, appear the same on the surface. The religious position, however, has no reliable way to update those beliefs. Fifty years from now, when entirely new social questions come up, there’s no guarantee at all that the modern, rights-respecting religion of today will not be hopelessly out of date and thus support some groundless harmful position. Remember, many of the most progressive thinkers of the 19th century often believed all sorts of untenable, damaging bullshit from today’s viewpoint.

You look down at your watch and realize its hands stopped moving hours ago. Should you just adjust the hands to match the current time, or should you change the battery?

Freshly sliced Fish

In the NY Times “Opinionator” blog Stanley Fish makes a confused case for (re)including religion and religion-derived justifications as valid motivations for state policy. Fish, agreeing with author Steven Smith, thinks that

Once the world is no longer assumed to be informed by some presiding meaning or spirit (associated either with a theology or an undoubted philosophical first principle) and is instead thought of as being “composed of atomic particles randomly colliding and . . . sometimes evolving into more and more complicated systems and entities including ourselves” there is no way, says Smith, to look at it and answer normative questions, questions like “what are we supposed to do?” and “at the behest of who or what are we to do it?”

Fish gets here by mischaracterizing “secular reasons” as being reasons that are expunged of all questions of values and only deal with raw empirical data

reasons cut off from any a priori stipulations of what is good and valuable — can take us a long way. We’ll do fine as long as we only want to find out how many X’s or Y’s there are or investigate their internal structure or discover what happens when they are combined, and so forth.

Russell Blackford does a beautiful job slicing up Fish's historically naïve musings. He notes, significantly, that Fish's strangely reductive definition of liberal secularism is a distortion- that one can recognize that values inform and motivate all decisions without thereby opening the field to arbitrary supernaturalistic explanations for one's values.

In attacking the Lockean approach to separation of church and state, Fish totally misunderstands the notorious fact/value distinction, which is not the same as the distinction between empirical and logical, or the distinction between natural and supernatural.

There is a distinction between allowing the state to make value-laden judgments (as all judgments are) in material matters where there is some recourse to facts to guide the decision making. But, as Blackford correctly points out, Fish's desire to include the realm of the religious here shows a sad ignorance of history. Religion is a type of knowledge structure which specifically privileges ignoring material facts and rational argumentation within its own epistemology- indeed it's proud of doing so, just ask kind old Martin Luther. Religion is in many ways a unique type of “epistemology” (*ahem*), and making it a matter for the state to decide has been historically dangerous. The result, sickening cycles of bloody religious warfare/cleansing and lame justifications of political tyranny, was the very history that motivated much of the early thought on tolerance!

However, I would also mention that Fish's obviously impossible definition of secular reasons, that they are thought to somehow leap directly out of data without values playing a part, does have its precursors. Notably, in the defenders of economic privilege with their notions of the market as some sort of force-of-nature. The last two centuries, especially with the dropping of “political economy” in favor of “economics”, have seen proponents of capitalism pretend that state decisions in the areas of property law, regulation, workers' control and political participation have been made on the basis of purely factual considerations. Even more obvious an example was the grossly misnamed “scientific socialism” of the Leninists, who pretended that it was “just the facts” of inexorable economic law that “forced” them to liquidate worker's councils in revolutionary Russia in 1917-18 or slaughter dissidents at Kronstadt in 1921 .

It has been a long battle to reintroduce considerations of values into economic and political discussions, or at least uncover that they have been there all along. Fish's argument would swing us all the way back to the other end of the spectrum by hiding the very real differences between types of value systems; “secular” knowledge structures such as Habermasian discourse ethics or Bryan Turner's vulnerability ethics can't possibly be equated with the arbitrary pronouncements of misogynistic, ethnocentric tribal leaders from thousands of years ago. Sorry to my postmodern relativist friends!