Is Darwinism Incompatable With Justice?

_{Barry Arrington

January 1, 2012

Intelligent Design}

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Over at The New Atlantis Robert P. Kraynak asks if Darwinists can logically ground a theory of justice:

What is so strange about our age is that demands for respecting human rights and human dignity are increasing even as the foundations for those demands are disappearing. In particular, beliefs in man as a creature made in the image of God, or an animal with a rational soul, are being replaced by a scientific materialism that undermines what is noble and special about man, and by doctrines of relativism that deny the objective morality required to undergird human dignity. How do we account for the widening gap between metaphysics and morals today? How do we explain “justice without foundations” — a virtue that seems to exist like a table without legs, suspended in mid-air? What is holding up the central moral beliefs of our times?

Comments

”As you acknowledged, there is nothing self-contradictory about an external standard of goodness that a god could either conform to (as in the case of Balder) or flout (in the case of Loki).” Champ, God is the standard. All of His commands flow out of and are based on who He is, His personhood, His character, and His essence. It is wrong to bear false witness because God is a God of truth. Adultery is forbidden because God is faithful and pure. Without God, you have no ultimate standard for justice, no way to define justice, or any way to prove that justice is "right" and injustice is "wrong" or "sinful". Morality becomes a matter of opinion as opposed to absolute. I agree with Timaeus. You are not describing the God of the Bible. Sure, anyone can conceive of an unjust god, but it is impossible for the true God of the Bible to be unjust. He is perfect and He always does what is right - even when we cannot fully understand/comprehend it. So you can conceive of an unjust god, but not an unjust God with God being defined as the Creator God of the Bible.tjguy_{January 3, 2012
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How do you know the egyptians wer innocent? Methinks it is your ignorance that says God was unjust.Joe_{January 3, 2012
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Yet Darwinism is not compatible with the evidence...Joe_{January 3, 2012
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but if he is goodness itself, or love itself, then they have completely missed the boat
This kind of argument always seems to me to be a bit of bewitchment of intelligence by language. To identify a particular thing (even if that thing is God) with an abstract noun as goodness or love seems to be a category mistake. Good, as applied to people, is an adjective describing how they tend to behave. Love is a verb describing something people do. You don't become good by dipping yourself in or partaking of Goodness. You become good by behaving in certain ways. Similarly you don't love someone by soaking yourself in the essence of love. You behave in certain ways. Surely you are not claiming God is form of behaviour?markf_{January 3, 2012
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Timaeus, Whether an unjust God is intelligible to Barry or to any particular subset of Christians is not the question (though I suspect that Barry would acknowledge that it is perfectly intelligible, even to those who upon further reflection embrace divine simplicity as an attempt to evade the Euthyphro dilemma). My statement, which Barry challenged, was not limited to Christians or to the Christian God:
The very fact that we can conceive of an unjust God shows that our concept of justice is not grounded in God.
As you acknowledged, there is nothing self-contradictory about an external standard of goodness that a god could either conform to (as in the case of Balder) or flout (in the case of Loki).champignon_{January 3, 2012
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He has defined “God” as “goodness.”
In that case he's chosen the other horn. The right horn, IMO. I don't call myself a theist any more, but when I did, I defined God as good. Or, as my son said in his confirmation class, when challenged as to whether he believed in God, said "as long as it's spelled with too Os". And not the horn chosen by William Lane Craig, incidentally. The "New Atheists" are not the ones to have reverted to "the vulgar conception". In the recent spat between WLC and Dawkins, it was Dawkins, the paradigmatic New Atheist, taking issue with WLC's "vulgar conception". Most atheists of my acquaintance, including myself, and my son, are perfectly happy when people define God as good, it's just that they don't see the point when it doesn't seem to add anything.Elizabeth Liddle_{January 3, 2012
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Yup.Elizabeth Liddle_{January 3, 2012
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Elizabeth, Proponents of the position that Barry is echoing think that they have evaded both horns of the dilemma. In their view, God's actions are good not by fiat, but because they flow out of his nature, which is good. This avoids the divine command theory horn of the dilemma. And since he is acting according to his nature, he is not subject to an external standard of goodness, thus avoiding the other horn. Or so they think. However, it seems to me that this just pushes the problem back one level. We now have a meta-Euthyphro dilemma: Is God's nature good because it's God's, or because it conforms to an external standard of goodness? Also, the idea that God is goodness, and mercy, and love, and justice -- otherwise known as the doctrine of divine simplicity -- opens up a different can of worms, the biggest worm being the fact that if God is identical to all of those things, then they must be identical to each other. They clearly are not. Some theologians just can't help digging themselves deeper and deeper. It's one of the problems that arises when a discipline is empirically untethered.champignon_{January 3, 2012
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No, Elizabeth, you don't need natural science to develop a justice system, but certain views about human nature promoted by certain theories from natural science could prove deleterious to certain views of justice. If you want to understand this at a deeper level than it can be dealt with in a blogging site, you should read the debate over "Darwinian natural right" which has been carried on for many years now in academic journals of political science and scholarly books. In particular, you should read the writings of Larry Arnhart and the critiques of Arnhart by others, especially John West. This is a subject on which a quick opinion should not be formed. T.Timaeus_{January 3, 2012
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No, Elizabeth, Barry hasn't done that. He hasn't defined "good" as "what is of God." He has defined "God" as "goodness." The way of cutting the Gordian Knot of the dilemma in Euthyphro is to deny that "God" (or in Plato's day, "the gods") has been correctly conceived. The dilemma is insoluble if you assume that a certain vulgar anthropomorphic conception of deity (in which God's power is conceivably divorcible from goodness) is the right one. But both Plato and Christianity -- at least, certain forms of Christianity -- transcended that vulgar conception. Unfortunately, both the New Atheists and their fundamentalist opponents seem bent on returning us to the vulgar conception. If the Christian God is merely Zeus raised to an arbitrarily high degree of power -- which is how many churchgoing people conceive of Him -- then the New Atheists have a good argument against the fundamentalists, but if he is goodness itself, or love itself, then they have completely missed the boat (and so have the fundamentalists). Of course, it goes without saying that in the previous two sentences, I'm speaking for myself, and not for Barry or for UD or for ID proponents generally. T.Timaeus_{January 3, 2012
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Champignon: The concept of an unjust God is perfectly intelligible to you only because you are conceiving of God anthropomorphically. Yes, if God is just a bigger, more powerful sort of intelligent being, like us blown up a million times in size and strength, then we can imagine him as being, despite his greater abilities, yet still evil, unjust, vain, etc. But what Barry is saying to you is that such a God is not the Christian God. Barry is saying that the Christian God isn't just some big powerful guy who happens to be good, even though he logically could also be evil. Barry is saying that the Christian God is *essentially* good. So "unjust God" or "evil God" is a contradiction in terms. It would not be a contradiction in terms to describe the more limited gods of paganism in that way, e.g., Loki -- evil god; Balder -- good god. They are, after all, just particular beings (albeit very powerful ones) among many beings in the universe. But the Christian God is the goodness beyond all beings. Of course, you could, if you wished, dispute that Barry has adequately characterized the Christian God. Certainly many conservative Protestants frequently speak of God in an anthropomorphic manner which suggests that God arbitrarily chooses whether he will be nasty or nice. So the question arises who has Christianity right, the Christian anthropomorphists or the Christian Platonists. But that's an internal theological debate among Christians. The point here is that, given Barry's understanding of the Christian God as "goodness itself," Euthyphro's dilemma is resolved by transcending the plane on which it is posed. For Barry, God is not capable of being "unjust," not because he cowers before some standard external to himself, but because his nature is to be just. And once you understand that, you should understand why "unjust God" is for Barry logically inconceivable. The entity that you are conceiving as potentially unjust is not, for Barry, God. T.Timaeus_{January 3, 2012
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All you've done, Barry, is opt for one horn: to define good as what is of God. Many theists (me, in my day, for instance, and, I'd argue, Jesus) opt for the other horn: We recognise what is of God by whether it is good or not ("by their fruits you shall know them"; "does a father offer his son a stone when he asks for bread?"; "is it wrong to pull your donkey out of the well on the sabbath?" etc etc). Your horn is useless, as it means that instead using our heads and hearts to discern what is good, and thus to discern true gods from false, we have to make an arbitrary choice as to which gods are true, in order to discover what is good. Which then lands you in "divine command theory" and attempting to justify genocide. I'll stick with the other horn.Elizabeth Liddle_{January 3, 2012
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What on earth does Darwinism have to do with it? You might as well ask: "Is quantum mechanics compatible with justice"? The only thing that Darwinism needs to be compatible with is evidence, which goes for any scientific theory. And you don't need science to develop a justice system.Elizabeth Liddle_{January 3, 2012
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Barry, You've missed the point. The question is not "Where does God's standard of justice come from?", it's "What is our concept of justice grounded in?" As I wrote:
The very fact that we can conceive of an unjust God shows that our concept of justice is not grounded in God.
My only reason for bringing up the Euthyphro dilemma was to show why the concept of an unjust God is perfectly intelligible to us. There is nothing incoherent about a standard of justice that is external to God. In fact, it should be obvious than an atheist's concept of justice is not logically grounded in God.champignon_{January 3, 2012
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Yes indeed, but note, Barry, that you get rid of the "unspoken platonic presupposition" (that good is some sort of independent being) in order to replace it with the genuine Platonic teaching -- that God is the superabounding Good which is "beyond being." (Republic.) And of course Plato's purpose in writing the Euthyphro was not to foist some false dilemma upon his readers, but to get them to think, and to see why the dilemma provides an unsatisfactory pair of alternatives. The problem is that many, over the years, have assumed that Plato himself chose one horn of the dilemma over the other, when in fact, as the Republic shows, he wanted his readers to transcend it. Thus, the Christian tradition could make use of Plato, because he did not set anything above God; while at the same time, this understanding of God prevented the extremes which come from radical voluntarism. At least, for a thousand years and more. But then, about the time of Bacon, Descartes, and Hobbes, radical voluntarism, always a potential development in Semitic religions, crept back in, and with it, the idea that goodness is a mere arbitrary construct. Unfortunately, some modern "conservative" Protestants have bought into the idea that "good is what God commands, no matter how vicious that might be," and when anyone counters that God is bound to be good, they scream that the critic is being "Platonic, not Biblical" in daring to set some standard of goodness above God. But in fact true Platonism does no such thing -- true Platonism teaches what you have said here. God is not bound by any external power to be good; goodness is his nature. So your rebuttal of Champignon is sound, but there is always the need to distill the genuine Platonic teaching out of the Dialogues; and it is crucial to understand that not even the apparent stance of Socrates in any particular dialogue is always a safe indicator of what Plato believed or taught. Socrates, for tactical purposes in a particular dramatic setting (remember what Euthyphro is about to do in the courtroom!), may appear to champion one side of the dilemma; but Plato, the man who is putting all these words in the mouth of Socrates and the person Socrates is arguing with, has a greater design. That design is not apparent without a reading of the totality of the Dialogues. So I am not disagreeing with you over substance, but the adjective "platonic" in the phrase which I quoted may be misleading to some. T.Timaeus_{January 2, 2012
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Champignon appeals to the hoary old Euthyphro dilemma to support his previous driveby talking point. In brief summary, the Euthyphro dilemma takes its name from a discussion between Socrates and Euthyphro. Socrates asks: Is the pious good because it is loved by the gods or do the gods love the pious because it is good? Here is the so-called dilemma: If the theist says that the pious is good because God loves it, they run smack into "divine command" ethics, i.e., something is good merely because God commands that it be so. The problem with this choice is that ethics suddenly becomes arbitrary. God commands murder to be wrong today; he could command that it be good tomorrow. On the other hand, if the theist says that God loves the pious because it is good, he most concede that something (i.e. the pious) is superior to God, which is an oxymoron if one defines God ontologically as "that which there is nothing greater than." Like every atheist who has ever trotted out the Euthyphro dilemma, champignon thinks he has us theists trapped on the horns of a dilemma, but he is wrong, because the dilemma is false. What's more, Christians have known the dilemma to be false since at least the time of Augustine (ca. 400 AD). In other words, champignon's arguments were refuted some 1600 years ago, and no one seems to have given him the memo. Here's the solution. The dilemma depends absolutely upon an unspoken platonic presupposition. That presupposition is that the "good" exists as a platonic abstraction. But this is not true. The good, if it exists at all, exists in God. In other words God is not "good." He is "goodness." Therefore, both horns of the dilemma are false. God does not construct the good; nor does he conform to the good. He IS the good. The good is his very nature.Barry Arrington_{January 2, 2012
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Allanius: Your remarks about Plato are, as in previous comments of yours, ill-founded. Plato and the Bible are the twin sources of great Western tradition of justice (as they are the twin sources of so much else that is beautiful and noble about the West). For the greatest part of Christian history, the consensus that the Bible and Plato were, if not entirely in agreement, at least in many important areas harmonious and mutually supportive, was overwhelming. You will find Platonism in the Greek Fathers, the Latin Fathers, the early Medieval tradition, in Dante, in the Scholastic tradition (yes, even there, alongside Aristotle), the great Renaissance thinkers (e.g., More, Pico), in 17th-century England (the Cambridge Platonists), in the metaphysical poets, and all through to the modern period, where we find Platonism in the writings of C. S. Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, and others. When Christianity has turned its back on Platonism in favor of a supposedly more "Biblical," i.e., "prophetic," form of religion, the result has frequently been an anti-cultural, anti-educated savagery, including murder and tyranny, whether we look to the violent destructions of organs and church art by the Calvinists in Germany, the cruel "witch"-burnings, the Inquisition, or the tyranny of the Rump Parliament. None of these activities would ever have been perpetrated or justified by an Augustine, an Origen, a Dante, a Scotus Erigena, a Henry More, or a C. S. Lewis. Platonism has always moderated the extreme tendencies of Church authorities and religious zealots. And politically, Platonists have always been constitutionalists and enemies of absolute authority. The great authoritarian philosophers -- such as Hobbes and Marx -- have been resolutely anti-Platonist. (And of course, as a not inconsiderable side-benefit, Platonists are generally great friends of intelligent design.) Regarding your point about Biblical ethics, yes, there are specific provisions in the Biblical law that are unique, but many of the general principles are found in many ancient cultures, as you could find out by reading not only the primary sources, but also C. S. Lewis, a Christian who was second to none in his respect for the Bible. I think you ought to look at his discussion of the Tao. Your account of the Republic shows little understanding. For Plato, justice is first and foremost a virtue indwelling in the soul, and only secondarily and by derivation political. As for the specifically "political" proposals in the book, you have not grasped Plato's irony. I would suggest you have a look at, among other things, Allan Bloom's 100-page Interpretive Essay, attached to his translation of the Republic. For the more spiritual aspects of Plato, look at Eric Voegelin's volume on Plato, and the writings of the Christian mystics. And of course, read the Apology, Crito, Euthyphro, Gorgias, and Symposium. T.Timaeus_{January 2, 2012
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The Bible is the only ancient book when it comes to justice. The Bible is the only book that gives specific commands for fair and merciful treatment of the poor, widows, orphans, and the stranger in our midst. The Bible prohibits usury—the curse of the poor—and commands periodic forgiveness of debt. The Bible commands leaving the gleanings of the harvest for the poor. The sacrificial foods that the Israelites were commanded to bring to the Temple were used partly for relief of the poor. The Bible prohibits unfair business practices. The Bible insists upon fair treatment of workers. If our religion-haters can find comparable passages in any other ancient text, I’d be very much interested in seeing them. Don’t bother—they’re not there. Justice, in the Bible, is rooted the value of life. God formed man from the dust of the earth and breathed into him the breath of life. Human life, then, is spiritual—and this includes the lives of the poor and the downtrodden. They deserve to be treated kindly and fairly not because God arbitrarily commands it but because their lives have value. Compare the Biblical love of justice with Plato’s celebrated Republic, which purports to be devoted to justice. For Plato, justice boils down in the end to political order, obtained through totalitarian means. “Justice” amounts to an all-powerful state dictating every aspect of life to its citizens. Plato recognizes the univeral appeal of justice, but he falls down every time he tries to define it, bringing us back to the theme of the post. Ultimately, the “justness” of his Republic depends upon an appeal to authority. The Republic is just because it is ruled by a Philosopher King! And he wouldn’t dream of ruling unjustly, would he? In the end, Plato must invoke the entirely whimsical notion of the “philosopher king” because he can find no rational basis for justice. We love justice by nature, but we must give ourselves over to someone who seems naturally wise in order to have it, because the love of justice cannot be satisfied by purely rational means. Not surprisingly, the “justice” of the philosopher king is of dubious value. “Justice” magically appears when private property is abolished as well as marriage and children are taken away from their parents and herded into institutions for appropriate indoctrination. “Justice” occurs when society has been divided into upper and lower classes so that the lower can be bred to serve the upper. Justice is a soulful value, but the only ancient book that provides a soulful definition of justice is the Bible. And the reason is that its definition is based on the value of life.allanius_{January 2, 2012
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Matteo, Your statement is not analogous to mine. An analogous statement would be:
The very fact that we can conceive of buggy software shows that our concept of correct software operation is not defined as "whatever software happens to do".
Which is, of course, true.champignon_{January 2, 2012
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I'm happy to elaborate, Barry. If our concept of justice were logically grounded in God, then whatever God did would be just by definition. In that case the phrase "unjust God" would be an oxymoron, a logical impossibility. However, we can conceive of an unjust God (in fact, the Old Testament is replete with examples of such a God in action -- for example, when God inflicted plagues on innocent Egyptians as punishment for the actions of their Pharaoh). If God can be unjust -- even if only in principle -- then our standard of justice is not grounded in God, but external to him.champignon_{January 2, 2012
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As a cradle Christian, I often struggle to sort out those elements in my thinking which are still legacies of what I've been taught and those which I have independently reasoned through. After reading Professor Kraynak's piece I again recognize that my beliefs regarding justice are rooted - i.e., find foundation - in the Creator's assertion of the special place of man in His creation. While appreciating the special is rather easy to achieve regarding kinship relationships, understanding that it applies to those I've never seen halfway across the planet requires more a leap of faith than any biological urge to preserve the human race could ever supply. Reasoning does gets me part of the way there, but faith carries me the rest of the journey. (BTW, I have a great deal of trouble conceiving of an unjust God - perhaps just my limited reasoning faculty, I suppose.)Rodin_{January 2, 2012
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"The very fact that we can conceive of an unjust God shows that our concept of justice is not grounded in God." Champ, that's an assertion, not an argument. Do you care to show the class the logical underpinnings, if any, of your assertion? Do you care to demonstrate how Professor Kraynak is wrong? Or do you believe your driveby talking points are sufficient?Barry Arrington_{January 2, 2012
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The very fact that we can conceive of buggy software shows that our concept of proper computer function is not grounded in boolean logic.Matteo_{January 2, 2012
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The very fact that we can conceive of an unjust God shows that our concept of justice is not grounded in God.champignon_{January 2, 2012
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Just an aside here that demands for human rights and dignity are pften or more just the ancient demands for people to get their way on some matter. Foundations in rights and dignity are uprooted precisely just to overthrow actual rights and dignity. Who deserves what indeed? Who says? Just establishments, gangs, and dumb quick instinct of people not weighing issues that thrown to them for quick answers or agreements to answers being forced.Robert Byers_{January 2, 2012
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