I stumbled upon this interview on YouTube with Christian theologian/apologist William Lane Craig. There is some introductory blather about New Atheism and Richard Dawkins but at about 18 minutes in, onwards Craig discusses what’s called Divine Command Theory, and how it applies to problematic accounts in the Hebrew Bible about the Conquest of the Promised Land.
Divine Command Theory is an ethical theory which proposes that an action’s status as morally good or bad is equivalent to whether it is commanded or prohibited by God. Morality is determined by God’s commands. For a person to be moral they must follow God’s commands. If God commands it, it is good. If God prohibits it, it is bad. For proponents it seemingly provides an objective, unimpeachable moral standard by which to live.
Generally the interviewer asks all the right questions. I’ll not pick at every point. Just one comment. Craig is a tenured professor of Philosphy who studied in England and got his PhD under Lutheran theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg in Germany. Most YouTube apologists are nuckle-dragging morons. Craig is decidedly not. And, in the end, here is such a person defending mass murder.
Anyone who looks an inch beyond their nose will wonder how a horrifying event like the Holocaust could have possibly happened. We are troubled to consider the fact that it was common everyday Germans who largely conducted the attempt to exterminate the Jews. If the Germans had all been psychopaths then these events would have no more moral significance than an avalanche wiping out a city in the Andes. As far as I am aware Adolph HItler never personally committed a single act of murder. He ordered it done. And he had millions of willing accomplices! In this interview I think we begin to see the germ of an explanation.
Not that I’m accusing Craig of being a Nazi. Just the opposite! In fact my point rests precisely on the fact that he is NOT a Nazi.
We have to face the fact that if a human being is convinced they act under legitimate authority, authority capable of justifying their actions and absolving them of personal responsibility for their actions, then even the most educated, cultured citizen is capable of committing the most horrifying acts.
Authority acts as a lens.
But of course to the acolytes of DCT, God is the Supreme Objective Authority. That’s what makes it useful as a concept. They have reached the stage where there is no need for intepretation or debate.
I suppose I can brag that my first academic publication was a (very critical) review of a book defending it.
Porphyry I won’t ask you to rehash all your comments here (although I’m very curious of course) but I would be interested in what you regard as your chief objection to DCT.
My objection gets to the unexamined assumptions behind it. Because DCT doesn’t solve the problems supporters clearly think it does. Craig makes a comment that normally, killing children would be unethical, unless God gives you a command. But he also claims that God’s “nature” (whatever that might mean) is “good”. But if God can command acts that aren’t normally “good” then what does “good” actually mean here? If “good” is whatever God commands then how do we know God is “good”? If God were “evil” what how would you tell? A strict Sunni monotheist would say that God is beyond “good” and “evil” and it is presumptuous to question God about anything. But of course the ideology of Christians prevents them from taking this position.
There was a missed opportunity I think when Craig responded to the question about the woman who killed her kids because she thought God told her to. Craig said she was obviously mentally ill. My response would have been to ask how he knows Moses or Joshua weren’t mentally ill?
If DM worked I’d just send you the piece to read. Alas.
The precise way I would prosecute the argument depends on the commitments of my foil, but speaking very generally, I think there are two major problems I’d focus on:
First, the prior obligation objection. To say that obligation, by nature, arises from divine commands literally begs the question. What is it about God and his commands that makes what he commands be obligatory? Is it that he can give you eternal bliss? Is it that he created you, and so is owed some supreme debt of gratitude? If you answer (it doesn’t matter what your answer is, just that you accept the question as valid), you have just admitted that there is actually some prior obligation that justifies the contention that divine commands give rise to obligations, such that it is not divine command per se that ultimately accounts for obligation.
Second, if it is precisely the fact that something is commanded by God that makes it be obligatory, that implies that atheists (or theists who mistakenly believe in the wrong god) can’t have justified true belief about obligations. How do we account for moral knowledge of those who don’t accept your God and his revealed moral code? Or do you admit that such people can’t know any true obligations–and so presumably are not subjectively bound by any obligations?
Firstly, thanks Porphyry.
Many of the determinist/materialist persuasion have thought long and hard about the implications for morality and ethics. Does it make sense to even discuss moral responsibility or moral accountability on such a view? Is it foolish and delusional to tell the Nazis they did something “wrong”? Is it incoherent to recommend we lock up murderers or sex abusers?
It’s fascinating how old this argument actually is. Most ancient cultures seem to have a concept of “fate” or “destiny” existing even prior to the gods. It seems to be the older view. This doesn’t seem so odd when we remember that the concept of the autonomous individual as a locus of rights and responsibilities is a relatively recent historical development. For most of human history one’s sense of self was defined by one’s place in the family or the tribe or the culture. Because we in the West tend to obsess so about the individual we’ve lost the ancient fear of exile, of being deprived of one’s group identity, a kind of annihilation. My point here is that talk of individual moral responsibility only makes sense in terms of a context that did not always exist.
Not that the ancients did not hold their peoples accountable. There seems to have been a balance of what we moderns might regard as contradictory outlooks. For example, to make this post relevant to the subject at hand, take Paul. Paul clearly believes that in some sense our spiritual fate is preordained by God. But he also views acceptance of God’s will as a choice. At no point does he attempt to reconcile these views. But also notice he never speaks in terms of the autonomous individual. It has been said that the NT knows nothing of solitary religion. This is certainly true. There is none of that “Jesus is my personal savior” stuff you hear from evangelicals. For Paul you are “saved” because you are part of the Body of Christ. You are damned because you are excluded from the Body. So morality is defined in terms of what one must do to be part of the Body and what actions must be avoided to be excluded from the Body.
But is there a determinist/materialist accounting of morality? Humans evolved as a social species. Morality can de defined, not as The Rules, but as a description of the interrelationship between members of a social species that evolves over time. This view has implications but let me not get ahead of myself.
What do we mean by “determinism” and “materialism”?
Materialism can be defined as the view that all that exists is matter and the physical processes that shape it. (By “materialism” I do NOT, NOT, NOT simply mean the desire to acquire physical objects to the exclusion of spiritual values.) I claim to be materialist because there doesn’t seem to be any evidence to the contrary. Opponents of this view need simply provide this evidence.
Determinism is the view that current events in space/time are determined by events prior in space/time. This seems such a common sense view that it’s hard to deny. The problems begin when we consider the implications. Once again let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Many, most(?) people have the sense that they possess “free-will”, the ability at each discrete moment to make choices, choices springing from our conscious human will. (Is that fair?) This perception seems solid enough but alas, rapidly breaks down under any sort of scrutiny.
Obviously there are simple-minded, non-nuanced colloquial definitions of all these concepts. Once you start actually thinking about them it gets really complicated. There is no view that is not troubling. My basic presuppositions are these: We should follow the evidence wherever it leads. In the absence of evidence we must reserve judgement (not simply make up an answer that pleases us). Just because we don’t have the right answer it doesn’t follow that there aren’t wrong answers. That an idea offends our sensibilities doesn’t mean it’s false. That an idea pleases us doesn’t mean it’s true.
But I’m no saint. As Richard Feynman pointed out, the easiest person to fool is ourselves. That’s what makes these kinds of discussions valuable. What do you think?
It’s funny that you bring this issue up now, Stephen.
I’ve been a hard-core libertarian (in the philosophical sense of the term) my whole life–although my view was always that we couldn’t prove determinism false but that if determinism is–contrary to our own personal self-experience–true, then we might as well stop trying to know anything: If I can be mistaken about something so basic as my responsibility for my own choices, I need to embrace radial skepticism.
But in the last two weeks, I’ve come, rather suddenly, to embrace ccompatibilism, which holds that free-will is compatible with determinism.
This requires tweaking a few things:
On the side of determinism, it requires a nuanced view of what materialistic determinism looks like. It does not hold that I do what I’m fated to do, then I imagine after the fact that I freely decided to do it. It means rather that my deliberations about what to do really do determine what I do, it’s just that my deliberations themselves proceed in a deterministic way.
On the side of free-will it requires surrendering the claim of radical self-determination. We have to temper what we mean by freedom. But this is actually a feature not a bug: the radical freedom of libertarian free-will is deeply problematic (I used to say, “mysterious” I’d now say (incoherent”).
A key realization for me was that the reason I felt wedded to libertarianism was that I believed in a personal creator God. If God made me, and if God will punish me for my sins, then any sort of determinism makes God into a Calvinistic monster,who punishes his creatures for sins he causally determined them to make. Without a personal God, compatibilism works pretty well.
And it turns out that most professional philosophers are compatibilists. Not probative, but certainly makes me think I’m on the right track now.
Hi what a coincidence I’ve literally been studying this very thing at the moment in class. One issue I’ve found with it is that if we are made in the image of God and people are fulfilling divine commands like the Israelites were surely we shouldn’t feel this repugnant feeling if they are fulfilling God’s will and we’re made with an innate moral compass inside of us and also how does one know when they are fulfilling a divine command or are merely mentally ill as remember William Lane Craig didn’t really answer this latter question very satisfactorily. Am curious to see if you reckon my problems with this theory are valid?
I’ve never really understand compatibilism really as I think the issue with the determinism and compatibilism debate is that if Compatibilists want to define free will the way they do they are certainly welcome to as when you actually look at what they are saying they aren’t really saying anything wrong as per se it’s just that most people (I.e determinists and libertarians) would define free will as the ability to have done differently which is what I think the main issue between Sam Harris and Daniel Dennet was whenever they would debate the issue.
“There was a missed opportunity I think when Craig responded to the question about the woman who killed her kids because she thought God told her to. Craig said she was obviously mentally ill. My response would have been to ask how he knows Moses or Joshua weren’t mentally ill?”-Never mind Porphry already perfect illustrated one of the issues I had with DCT!
Let’s start with the incoherence of libertarian free will. Free choice is very much like God in that a libertarian free choice has no explanation, just as classical theists say God has no further explanation. In both cases the ultimate explanation of the thing (God or a genuinely free choice) is the explicandum itself. You can offer factors that influenced your final choice, but at the end of the day, as you go back through your internal deliberation, those factors don’t fully account for the final choice, something is always left unexplained. That something is the truly free part of the choice–the moment during your deliberation when you freely decided, I’m interested in this more than that, for example. When you get to that moment, you can’t keep asking. It is its own explanation. It is necessarily inscrutable. “Why did you make that choice?” has no real answer aside from, “because it is what I willed.”
In the case of God, his being his own ultimate explanation implies he is a necessary being. He is not gratuitous; rather he cannot not be. That obviously doesn’t work in the case of a free choice. Unless of course you are a determinist.
The thing is that the sort of determinism I am describing is, so far as I can see, perfectly consistent with our experience of choosing. I think about what I want, and I think about how to get what I want. At the end of the day, I could have done otherwise, *if* I had wanted to. But I didn’t, that’s why I did what I did. This is what I wanted and it’s what I did, and that is what freedom is. The choice, the act, is mine because the desire is mine.
The libertarian understanding of free will (at least as I conceive of it) ultimately implies that there is some “I” that is prior to all the factors that influence my character and choices–my genetics, brain chemistry, my deep-seated innate desires and fears, the sum of my life experiences, and so forth. That unhindered bit is, for the libertarian, the true and essential “me”, which is why, if you say that all those other influences are enough to fully determine my choices, you have effectively taken my choices away from me; they are no longer *my* choices or *my* actions, and I don’t really own them because I inherited them, so to speak. I suppose my point is that it’s not at all clear to me what the essential core of me is that could be leftover after everything that has formed me and constituted my character is taken away.
In many contexts we have no issue at all identifying with our character– We say things like *I* am even keeled; *I* am scrupulously just; or *I* am a bit of a hot head; or *I* can be a bit of an ass; we have no problem treating such characteristics as part of who we are–and we tend to take credit for them if they are good or to be ashamed of them if they are bad. Again, if we look at friends we know well, we think in knowing what they are and are not capable of, we know *them*; we think that, if we are able to predict how they will and won’t act in certain situations, it is because we know *them*. E.g., “that’s just not who he is; that’s not the John I know.” Or “That is just like him.” “He would never cheat on his wife.” OR “He would prostitute his own mother for a quick buck.”
I’m not saying we can know what we will do with perfect accuracy–we are too complicated, influenced by too many factors to be perfectly predictable in practice even to ourselves (aside from really trivial choices). But we do think we can know something about each other and ourselves–there is something to know–there can be a matter of fact about what I would do in certain situations–, and we don’t hesitate to identify that something there is to know about how we would acts with our true selves.
I think studying Molinism gives some helpful insight here. In the De auxiliis conroversy, thee Molinists were the libertarians: they were the ones most committed to maintaining real free will. But they explained divine providence by insisting that God, being omniscient, super-comprehends each individual: He knows you (and everyone else), as an individual, and he knows you so well that he can also know with absolute certainty what you would freely choose in any given situation you could ever be placed in (this is the basis of his scientia media which is in turn the basis for his providence). To make this plausible, they argued pretty persuasively that, in principle, the fact that some of your possible free choices are predictable doesn’t make them less free. Consider, for example, something that would be truly preposterous to do and utterly out of character, like sawing off my hand while sober, of sound and alert mind, and without any medical necessity, etc etc etc; I think I can say with very high confidence I would never freely choose to do that. If I can in principle make even one such prediction about any possible free choice, that proves that freedom and predictability are not necessarily opposed. A choice can be genuinely free (surely I *could* saw off my hand if I chose to, at least I could try to even if I don’t have the mettle to carry on through the pain) and still be able to be predicted with absolute certainty.
If you take that argument seriously, it leads to determinism–what exactly can I know about myself that determines that I certainly would act this way or that in a particular hypothetical situation? If there is an answer, you have some form of determinism. There is something about me that determines ahead of time how I will freely choose. But again, the Molinists were the libertarians; they were the ones fighting for free will; and they insisted that that sort of predictability, even if it applies to every choice I could ever make, still doesn’t compromise my genuine freedom in making those choices.
when you speak of libertarian, is that some kind of extreme or absolutely free will?
I mean some genuine measure of un-predetermined freedom.
Everyone–libertarians included–acknowledge that factors outside of our control can somehow *influence* our choices–it is an observable fact that our choices tend to be influenced by various factors–but they will insist that they don’t determine those choices; there remains some radical freedom underneath those influences.
It’s funny that you bring this issue up now, Stephen.
What choice did I have? BWAHAHAHA… Sorry.
Robert, don’t try to hide behind false humility. Much too late for that.
Jill, move a little closer to the microphone. Ha!
Tomos, what kind of class?
I am pleased this thread has taken off so. But I’m somewhat unsure which rabbit to chase. So let me start with fundamentals. Identifying as one such, what do I mean by determinist? Let’s back into it. I do NOT mean that at the moment of the Big Bang every subsequent event was preordained, including this very post. This sort of “hard”, dare I say “mechanistic”, determinism has been vitiated by the modern understanding of randomness in physical processes. This sort of absolutist view was the dream of Newtonian physics. To be able to understand the parameters of reality in one discrete moment and then be able to extrapolate both forwards and backwards from the beginning to the end. To stand apart and consider the completeness of the whole.
Relativity and Quantum physics shattered this dream. One cannot comprehend a complete system using the axioms of that system. There is no objective privileged position from which to consider the whole. We no longer deal in certainties but in probabilities. We build models of reality, always subject to modification or even disconfirmation. The best way I’ve heard it expressed is that we build the bridge of reality while we’re crossing it.
Yet these systems remain deterministic because current states are determined by prior states. And even discontinuities in the system are predicted and determined. As far as human behavior goes, the old argument between nature and nurture is simply a misunderstanding. To use the ugly (and misleading) metaphor of computers, much of human behavior is indeed hardwired but much of it is soft-wired, determined by experience, capable of variable responses. The only way “free-will” would be meaningful in this context is if the human bio-computer could fully control its own programming. Another dream. It’s simply too complicated.
It seems to me that the free-will described by compatibilism is the freedom to to act upon our will unencumbered. But what formed our “will” in the first place?
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