Post by gunk on May 18, 2006 0:34:34 GMT -5
I'm not sure if I need a warning or rating for this essay, but...
Rating: K
This is an essay I wrote for Philosophy and if anyone wishes to reference anything or contact me for any reason, you are welcome to. Also, this is a discussion for my ethics class, not a stab at any particular person or group.
‘We should pick our moral principles by following God’s will’ At first glance Supernaturalism, or Divine Command Theory, would seem to most religious people as common sense and to others it could well prove to be intriguing. What better way to choose our moral principles than by following the will of someone (or something) that is supposedly omniscient and omnipotent? Nevertheless, to those with a more sceptical outlook this statement can have many downfalls and raises many challenging questions. The first of which is simply: who, or what, is God? There are many religions in the world at the moment, with more arising every few years, each with their own version of ‘God’ and each with its own version of what ‘God’s will’ is. Which religion is correct about God, which religion knows God’s true will? On the assumption of the existence of the Christian God, the second question would be: how can one know God’s will? Short of dying and asking God first hand, there has yet to be a clear-cut, indisputable way to know God’s will. So how can Christians claim to choose their moral principles based on said will? The third question is more generalized, aiming at the theory itself rather than just the religious aspects: when, exactly, is something ‘good’? In Plato’s ‘Euthyphro’, Socrates asks the question of ‘whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods’. These issues and more will be discussed in this essay to show that, although following God’s will sounds easy it can actually be both difficult and uncertain.
One problem with choosing moral principles by following God’s will is with choosing which God to base the statement on. The God chosen will inevitably have an effect on the moral principles, not in the least because of the way people practice the religion of that God. Here I will discuss five major religions, those being Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism and Hinduism. Even within these religions there is conflict over facts as seen by the number of denominations each religion has within it. It will be the central, generalized dogma that will be discussed here, starting with Hinduism.
In Hinduism there is thought to be one universal God, or soul, called Brahman. To the Hindus Brahman is indefinable yet exists as the soul, or Atman, in every human, is eternal and is creator, preserver and transformer of everything.1 However, Hindus revere many Gods and Goddesses who are said to be different facets of Brahman. The Hindu scriptures are called the Vedas and were passed down orally from generation to generation for thousands of years.
Buddhism is an easy religion to dismiss from any ties with supernaturalism, as Buddhists do not worship any God. Buddhists believe that the path to enlightenment, which the founder of Buddhism Siddhartha Gautama reached, comes through the practice and development of morality, meditation and wisdom.
Islam, Christianity and Judaism, on the other hand, are all monotheistic, meaning they worship one God. In fact, these three religions are called Abrahamic religions because they all derive from a common Semitic tradition involving Abraham. Muslims, those who practice Islam, believe in the One God whom they refer to as Allah. They believe that Muhammad was the last Prophet of God, and that the Holy Qur’an is the exact word of God told to humanity through Muhammad. Jews also believe in one God and according to Jewish thought, the God who created the world established a covenant with the Jewish people, and revealed his laws and commandments to them in the form of the Torah.2 The Torah refers to the Five Books of Moses, which in the Christian Bible is refered to as the Old Testament. Christianity has its basis in Jewish faith, in that they share the Old Testament, however Christianity focuses more on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. It focuses on the Holy Trinity, (Father, Son and the Holy Spirit) and the New Testament of the Bible.
These religions show the diversity of beliefs about just who or what God is or, in the case of Buddhists, whether or not God exists. This is the problem faced by those who are interested in the Divine Command Theory, just whose divine command are they meant to follow? Buddhism does not worship any God and therefore can not easily be a basis for supernaturalism. Hindus believe in one universal God who has many facets that are revered, yet their means of knowing God’s will was passed down orally, leaving much room for doubt over the accuracy of the information within the Vedas. Even Islam, Christianity and Judaism, who effectively worship the same God, cannot be grouped together as one religion because of their differences. It is these differences that show why the word ‘God’, and the value judgement that goes along with choosing one, makes the divine command theory more subjective and based on preferences than it would seem at first glance.
Another way the divine command theory proves to be weak is when the question of how God’s will is known is asked. For the purpose of this section, I will be focusing on the Christian God. According to Gensler the will of God can be known through four things: the Bible, the Church, prayer or reason.
The first of the four things, the Bible, is perhaps the most important. Not only is the Bible central to the dogma of Christian belief as the word of God but it is also believed to be an historical account of true events. Which brings up the first problem with material like the Bible, that of bias and credibility. Granted credibility hasn’t always been an issue in the past when it comes to the Bible but the fact that it was humans who wrote the Bible, man not God, is an important issue to discuss. As with all sources, the author inevitably places a bias in written work, as much with what they leave out as with what they put in. Language always has a purpose and in this case the purpose is quite clearly to pursuade people to become Christians and then to teach them how to actually be ‘Christian’. That may seem like a harsh statement but I don’t mean to say that the Bible is a hoax or even that the authors and collators had any ‘underhanded’ purpose in mind. I am merely saying that bias is inevitable and the credibility of such old texts should be questioned, especially when there have been as many revisions to it as there have been to the Bible. Another problem with the Bible that stems from its age, is the fact that there are issues being raised currently that there is no clear answer for in the Bible, such as stem cells and cloning. It has been suggested that the Bible should not be taken literally, that it is often metaphorical and needs interpretation. But interpretation is subjective and entirely human, and to me it detracts from the image of the Bible as the word of God. An area of possible literal meaning is found within the Ten Commandments, whose origins were supposedly not from man, but directly from God and whose meanings are quite clear.
One possible way to avoid the problem is by involving the Church, letting the ‘experts’ interpret the Bible and educate the followers in the word of God. But this brings up the nature of the word ‘expert’ and does not circumvent the problem that the leaders of the Church are still human and have the same versions of the Bible as everyone else. An expert is typically someone who has extensive knowledge on a given subject and they are generally recognized as experts because of some academic acknowledgement, such as a masters degree or some other institutional recognition of achievement. The problem comes with the assumption over where that knowledge comes from, because the source of the experts’ knowledge will have an effect on the way that person interprets the Bible. Also perception and interpretation of information is effected by the purpose of the interpretation. That is, when somebody has an idea of what they want to find, even if it is subconsciously, they will inevitably interpret information and evidence in such a way that supports their initial idea. Most of the time, these assumptions remain the same, however church teaching has been known to evolve over the years.3 It is this very fact, that Church teachings have changed, that shows the effect the human qualities of the Church leaders have in the form of the interpretation and subsequent teaching of the Bible.
Then, disregarding both the Bible and the Church as sources of knowing God’s will, prayer is the next choice given by Gensler. The problem with prayer is, again, with interpretation and perception. The effect of purpose is also an important subject in prayer. Much like horoscopes, prayer is hardly ever explicitly answered and, again like horoscopes, when someone is looking for something in particular to happen they will usually find it, even if it is only because they have interpreted it to suit what they were looking for.
The final way put forth by Gensler is reason, by ‘intuition’ or by the ideal observer theory. The problem with reason is its dependence on individual preference or feeling to discover what God’s will is. Much like previously discussed, you cannot assume that interpretation and perception has no effect on what you find to be God’s will because if it didn’t then there would be no arguments or controversy over what God’s will is, as we would all come up with the same answer.
So, overall, the ways in which God’s will can be known, either through the Bible, the Church, prayer or reason, all fall short of a strong, indisputable argument for the divine command theory. The value judgements involved are just too important to dismiss and to me they weaken the support for supernaturalism.
The third question raised by supernaturalism is over the nature of value. This was best described by Socrates in Plato’s ‘Euthyphro’ when he asked ‘whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods’. This idea is to do with the discussion of inherent value vs. imputed value. Put into this situation, Gensler’s version is quite useful: Is a good thing good because God desires it? Or does God desire it because it is good? There are problems either way for the divine command theorist. Take the Gensler’s second question, ‘does God desire it because it is good’. If this statement were true, then the theory would not hold because the divine command theory says that we should pick our moral principles by following God’s will. By saying this it is insisting that moral principles are dependent on God’s will and are therefore neutral before God wills them, whereas the second question says that it is morally good before God desires it and therefore moral goodness is independent of God. This would be inherent value; that something is, in and of itself, ‘good’ or ‘bad’.
So, then, it would appear as if the first question is more compatible with the divine command theory, but in practice it raises more problems than the second question. When saying that something is good because God desires it, only imputed value is involved. Inherent value is lost so that the thing that God desires was neutral, or had no value, before God desired it. This raises the problem of arbitrariness, because morality is thus based on God’s whims and if morality is based merely on someone’s whims then it becomes arbitrary. Also, if all moral value is dependent on God’s will, then God’s judgements can never be based on morality.
This strikes many as problematic. If there are no moral facts before God decides what to command, it seems, then God’s commands can be neither informed nor sanctioned by morality. God’s will, the standard of moral goodness, will itself be morally arbitrary.4
Another problem raised by this question is the idea that all moral statements about god are tautologies. An example would be to say ‘God is good’, which would then be ‘God is as he willed himself to be’. However, saying that the divine command theory is about human morality and therefore cannot be applied to God can refute this. Another way to refute this is by arguing that ‘tautologies… are often highly significant’5.
The last problem raised by the question is that of the neutrality of the moral deed before God desires it. This can lead to situations where something is ‘morally objectionable’, such as rape. If God decided he desires it then, according to the divine command theory, it would be morally good.
The problems raised by Socrates’ question are perhaps the most deadly to the already weakened divine command theory. They pinpoint flaws in the theory and call into question some of the fundamental assumptions made by a lot people in ethics, most importantly that of inherent value over imputed value.
In conclusion, the statement‘We should pick our moral principles by following God’s will’, which at first glance seems to not only be a legitimate statement but a defensible one as well, is shortly revealed to have a number of serious flaws. There is much difficulty in choosing which God to base the theory on with one major religion, Buddhism, unable to handle the theory because of the lack of any God in their dogma. As well as this problem, there is also the matter of finding out what God’s will even is. All four ways Gensler mentioned have been shown to be weak and problematic, especially the Bible as a source of information. The worst problem is the reliance on perception and interpretation in order to figure out what ‘God’s will’ supposedly is. Lastly, there were the problems raised by Socrates’ question about ‘whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods’. The ideas of moral arbitrariness, inherent vs. imputed value and that of emptiness of judgement are the final elements in proving that moral principles should not be picked by following God’s will.
References
Gensler H, (1998) Ethics a contemporary introduction (pp.33-44) London: Routledge
Holt , 2005, The Arbitrariness Problem Online http:www.philosophyofreligion.info/arbitrariness.html 17/09/05
Holt , 2005, The Problem of Abhorrent Commands Online http:www.philosophyofreligion.info/abhorrentcommands.html 17/09/05
Judaism Online 16/09/05
Religion & Ethics Homepage of BBC Religion & Ethics Online 16/09/05
1 Religion & Ethics Homepage of BBC Religion & Ethics Online 16/09/05
2 Judaism Online 16/09/05
3 Gensler H, (1998) Ethics a contemporary introduction (pp.33-44) London: Routledge
4 Holt , 2005, The Arbitrariness Problem Online http:www.philosophyofreligion.info/arbitrariness.html 17/09/05
5 id., The Problem of Abhorrent Commands Online http:www.philosophyofreligion.info/abhorrentcommands.html 17/09/05
Rating: K
This is an essay I wrote for Philosophy and if anyone wishes to reference anything or contact me for any reason, you are welcome to. Also, this is a discussion for my ethics class, not a stab at any particular person or group.
‘We should pick our moral principles by following God’s will’ At first glance Supernaturalism, or Divine Command Theory, would seem to most religious people as common sense and to others it could well prove to be intriguing. What better way to choose our moral principles than by following the will of someone (or something) that is supposedly omniscient and omnipotent? Nevertheless, to those with a more sceptical outlook this statement can have many downfalls and raises many challenging questions. The first of which is simply: who, or what, is God? There are many religions in the world at the moment, with more arising every few years, each with their own version of ‘God’ and each with its own version of what ‘God’s will’ is. Which religion is correct about God, which religion knows God’s true will? On the assumption of the existence of the Christian God, the second question would be: how can one know God’s will? Short of dying and asking God first hand, there has yet to be a clear-cut, indisputable way to know God’s will. So how can Christians claim to choose their moral principles based on said will? The third question is more generalized, aiming at the theory itself rather than just the religious aspects: when, exactly, is something ‘good’? In Plato’s ‘Euthyphro’, Socrates asks the question of ‘whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods’. These issues and more will be discussed in this essay to show that, although following God’s will sounds easy it can actually be both difficult and uncertain.
One problem with choosing moral principles by following God’s will is with choosing which God to base the statement on. The God chosen will inevitably have an effect on the moral principles, not in the least because of the way people practice the religion of that God. Here I will discuss five major religions, those being Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism and Hinduism. Even within these religions there is conflict over facts as seen by the number of denominations each religion has within it. It will be the central, generalized dogma that will be discussed here, starting with Hinduism.
In Hinduism there is thought to be one universal God, or soul, called Brahman. To the Hindus Brahman is indefinable yet exists as the soul, or Atman, in every human, is eternal and is creator, preserver and transformer of everything.1 However, Hindus revere many Gods and Goddesses who are said to be different facets of Brahman. The Hindu scriptures are called the Vedas and were passed down orally from generation to generation for thousands of years.
Buddhism is an easy religion to dismiss from any ties with supernaturalism, as Buddhists do not worship any God. Buddhists believe that the path to enlightenment, which the founder of Buddhism Siddhartha Gautama reached, comes through the practice and development of morality, meditation and wisdom.
Islam, Christianity and Judaism, on the other hand, are all monotheistic, meaning they worship one God. In fact, these three religions are called Abrahamic religions because they all derive from a common Semitic tradition involving Abraham. Muslims, those who practice Islam, believe in the One God whom they refer to as Allah. They believe that Muhammad was the last Prophet of God, and that the Holy Qur’an is the exact word of God told to humanity through Muhammad. Jews also believe in one God and according to Jewish thought, the God who created the world established a covenant with the Jewish people, and revealed his laws and commandments to them in the form of the Torah.2 The Torah refers to the Five Books of Moses, which in the Christian Bible is refered to as the Old Testament. Christianity has its basis in Jewish faith, in that they share the Old Testament, however Christianity focuses more on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. It focuses on the Holy Trinity, (Father, Son and the Holy Spirit) and the New Testament of the Bible.
These religions show the diversity of beliefs about just who or what God is or, in the case of Buddhists, whether or not God exists. This is the problem faced by those who are interested in the Divine Command Theory, just whose divine command are they meant to follow? Buddhism does not worship any God and therefore can not easily be a basis for supernaturalism. Hindus believe in one universal God who has many facets that are revered, yet their means of knowing God’s will was passed down orally, leaving much room for doubt over the accuracy of the information within the Vedas. Even Islam, Christianity and Judaism, who effectively worship the same God, cannot be grouped together as one religion because of their differences. It is these differences that show why the word ‘God’, and the value judgement that goes along with choosing one, makes the divine command theory more subjective and based on preferences than it would seem at first glance.
Another way the divine command theory proves to be weak is when the question of how God’s will is known is asked. For the purpose of this section, I will be focusing on the Christian God. According to Gensler the will of God can be known through four things: the Bible, the Church, prayer or reason.
The first of the four things, the Bible, is perhaps the most important. Not only is the Bible central to the dogma of Christian belief as the word of God but it is also believed to be an historical account of true events. Which brings up the first problem with material like the Bible, that of bias and credibility. Granted credibility hasn’t always been an issue in the past when it comes to the Bible but the fact that it was humans who wrote the Bible, man not God, is an important issue to discuss. As with all sources, the author inevitably places a bias in written work, as much with what they leave out as with what they put in. Language always has a purpose and in this case the purpose is quite clearly to pursuade people to become Christians and then to teach them how to actually be ‘Christian’. That may seem like a harsh statement but I don’t mean to say that the Bible is a hoax or even that the authors and collators had any ‘underhanded’ purpose in mind. I am merely saying that bias is inevitable and the credibility of such old texts should be questioned, especially when there have been as many revisions to it as there have been to the Bible. Another problem with the Bible that stems from its age, is the fact that there are issues being raised currently that there is no clear answer for in the Bible, such as stem cells and cloning. It has been suggested that the Bible should not be taken literally, that it is often metaphorical and needs interpretation. But interpretation is subjective and entirely human, and to me it detracts from the image of the Bible as the word of God. An area of possible literal meaning is found within the Ten Commandments, whose origins were supposedly not from man, but directly from God and whose meanings are quite clear.
One possible way to avoid the problem is by involving the Church, letting the ‘experts’ interpret the Bible and educate the followers in the word of God. But this brings up the nature of the word ‘expert’ and does not circumvent the problem that the leaders of the Church are still human and have the same versions of the Bible as everyone else. An expert is typically someone who has extensive knowledge on a given subject and they are generally recognized as experts because of some academic acknowledgement, such as a masters degree or some other institutional recognition of achievement. The problem comes with the assumption over where that knowledge comes from, because the source of the experts’ knowledge will have an effect on the way that person interprets the Bible. Also perception and interpretation of information is effected by the purpose of the interpretation. That is, when somebody has an idea of what they want to find, even if it is subconsciously, they will inevitably interpret information and evidence in such a way that supports their initial idea. Most of the time, these assumptions remain the same, however church teaching has been known to evolve over the years.3 It is this very fact, that Church teachings have changed, that shows the effect the human qualities of the Church leaders have in the form of the interpretation and subsequent teaching of the Bible.
Then, disregarding both the Bible and the Church as sources of knowing God’s will, prayer is the next choice given by Gensler. The problem with prayer is, again, with interpretation and perception. The effect of purpose is also an important subject in prayer. Much like horoscopes, prayer is hardly ever explicitly answered and, again like horoscopes, when someone is looking for something in particular to happen they will usually find it, even if it is only because they have interpreted it to suit what they were looking for.
The final way put forth by Gensler is reason, by ‘intuition’ or by the ideal observer theory. The problem with reason is its dependence on individual preference or feeling to discover what God’s will is. Much like previously discussed, you cannot assume that interpretation and perception has no effect on what you find to be God’s will because if it didn’t then there would be no arguments or controversy over what God’s will is, as we would all come up with the same answer.
So, overall, the ways in which God’s will can be known, either through the Bible, the Church, prayer or reason, all fall short of a strong, indisputable argument for the divine command theory. The value judgements involved are just too important to dismiss and to me they weaken the support for supernaturalism.
The third question raised by supernaturalism is over the nature of value. This was best described by Socrates in Plato’s ‘Euthyphro’ when he asked ‘whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods’. This idea is to do with the discussion of inherent value vs. imputed value. Put into this situation, Gensler’s version is quite useful: Is a good thing good because God desires it? Or does God desire it because it is good? There are problems either way for the divine command theorist. Take the Gensler’s second question, ‘does God desire it because it is good’. If this statement were true, then the theory would not hold because the divine command theory says that we should pick our moral principles by following God’s will. By saying this it is insisting that moral principles are dependent on God’s will and are therefore neutral before God wills them, whereas the second question says that it is morally good before God desires it and therefore moral goodness is independent of God. This would be inherent value; that something is, in and of itself, ‘good’ or ‘bad’.
So, then, it would appear as if the first question is more compatible with the divine command theory, but in practice it raises more problems than the second question. When saying that something is good because God desires it, only imputed value is involved. Inherent value is lost so that the thing that God desires was neutral, or had no value, before God desired it. This raises the problem of arbitrariness, because morality is thus based on God’s whims and if morality is based merely on someone’s whims then it becomes arbitrary. Also, if all moral value is dependent on God’s will, then God’s judgements can never be based on morality.
This strikes many as problematic. If there are no moral facts before God decides what to command, it seems, then God’s commands can be neither informed nor sanctioned by morality. God’s will, the standard of moral goodness, will itself be morally arbitrary.4
Another problem raised by this question is the idea that all moral statements about god are tautologies. An example would be to say ‘God is good’, which would then be ‘God is as he willed himself to be’. However, saying that the divine command theory is about human morality and therefore cannot be applied to God can refute this. Another way to refute this is by arguing that ‘tautologies… are often highly significant’5.
The last problem raised by the question is that of the neutrality of the moral deed before God desires it. This can lead to situations where something is ‘morally objectionable’, such as rape. If God decided he desires it then, according to the divine command theory, it would be morally good.
The problems raised by Socrates’ question are perhaps the most deadly to the already weakened divine command theory. They pinpoint flaws in the theory and call into question some of the fundamental assumptions made by a lot people in ethics, most importantly that of inherent value over imputed value.
In conclusion, the statement‘We should pick our moral principles by following God’s will’, which at first glance seems to not only be a legitimate statement but a defensible one as well, is shortly revealed to have a number of serious flaws. There is much difficulty in choosing which God to base the theory on with one major religion, Buddhism, unable to handle the theory because of the lack of any God in their dogma. As well as this problem, there is also the matter of finding out what God’s will even is. All four ways Gensler mentioned have been shown to be weak and problematic, especially the Bible as a source of information. The worst problem is the reliance on perception and interpretation in order to figure out what ‘God’s will’ supposedly is. Lastly, there were the problems raised by Socrates’ question about ‘whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods’. The ideas of moral arbitrariness, inherent vs. imputed value and that of emptiness of judgement are the final elements in proving that moral principles should not be picked by following God’s will.
References
Gensler H, (1998) Ethics a contemporary introduction (pp.33-44) London: Routledge
Holt , 2005, The Arbitrariness Problem Online http:www.philosophyofreligion.info/arbitrariness.html 17/09/05
Holt , 2005, The Problem of Abhorrent Commands Online http:www.philosophyofreligion.info/abhorrentcommands.html 17/09/05
Judaism Online 16/09/05
Religion & Ethics Homepage of BBC Religion & Ethics Online 16/09/05
1 Religion & Ethics Homepage of BBC Religion & Ethics Online 16/09/05
2 Judaism Online 16/09/05
3 Gensler H, (1998) Ethics a contemporary introduction (pp.33-44) London: Routledge
4 Holt , 2005, The Arbitrariness Problem Online http:www.philosophyofreligion.info/arbitrariness.html 17/09/05
5 id., The Problem of Abhorrent Commands Online http:www.philosophyofreligion.info/abhorrentcommands.html 17/09/05
