Wait a minute. There's a problem here. This argument isn't resting on bedrock. It's floating in mid-air. For people who have spent their entire lives putting the idea --the absolutely unquestioned idea-- of an all-good God at the center of their worldview, it might be difficult to imagine a God who was not good. But a God who is not good is not logically impossible. Indeed, the idea of an Evil Creator has been believed by some religious groups in history. What some people have deeply believed we should at least be able to imagine.
So, if we were to imagine the Cosmos as ruled by some Being with a character like Saddam Hussein, would we then say that obedience to such a God was morally good? I can imagine saying that it is prudent --just as I can imagine keeping my head down if I lived in Saddam's Iraq-- but if you asked me what is "good" about upholding a murderous regime, say, or ratting on my neighbors, or seizing what belongs to someone else, all because I am ordered by a tyrant to do so, I could not find any acceptable answer. No "clonk" of bedrock just because the Guy with the power commands it. To say otherwise would be to say that might makes right, which is to say that we are not talking about right at all.
This notion of God-as-Saddam is irrelevant, the fundamentalist will argue, because that's not what we've got-- we've got a good God. But this position has two problems. The less important is the empirical one; the more important the logical one.
The empirical problem is that the record of the Bible provides plenty of troubling evidence about God's moral character. I am willing to grant that the great preponderance of the moral law as handed down through the Scriptures of the Judeo-Christian tradition --from the Ten Commandments on through the Golden Rule-- has a quality that is largely consistent with my sense of what is morally right. Don't murder, don't steal, treat other people as you would like to be treated-- I've tried to inculcate such moral precepts in my own three children. But if we are talking about moral bedrock, "most of it" isn't good enough. If God commanded us to do what is morally wrong even once, "Because God said so" would be disqualified as a sufficient guide for doing what's right.
It is not difficult to find places where God's moral stance is in conflict with the moral sense that most of us apply in every other situation. To cite just one dramatic example, as the children of Israel are wandering in the wilderness after the Exodus from Egypt, God commands them to do what nowadays would be called genocide, prosecutable as crimes against humanity. [Quote from Exodus] We are compelled to conclude either 1) that genocide is good, or 2) that God commanded people to do what is morally wrong, or 3) that we cannot trust the record about what God commands. To me, the first notion is completely untenable; it would make a mockery of the idea of "goodness." Between the other two possibilities, the third is eminently plausible and creates no difficulties of any kind for me. A man in West Virginia not long ago murdered his son, claiming (in all evident sincerity) that God told him to do it, and I don't implicate the Almighty in that crime either.
But for some of my callers, the fact that it says in the Good Book that God said it means that he did. For them, either of the second two options --God commanding evil, or the Bible misreporting God's Truth-- fatally undermines their fundamentalist belief in their possession of moral bedrock, so they feel compelled to make the case for the first option. So callers have explained to me why it was right for the children of Israel to seize a city and to put to the sword every single man, woman and child. "They were idolaters, you see. And God wanted his Chosen People to be free of their pernicious influences." If this is the way an all-good being would operate, I say, what's so good about goodness?
But the empirical problem with God's goodness goes considerably deeper. Jack Miles has written an extraordinary book, <em>God: A Biography</em> , which systematically explores the character of God as it unfolds through the Old Testament. He does it in a straight-forward and low-key way, so undramatically that I've read favorable reviews of the book in conventionally religious publications. But if one reads the book with an open mind, unfettered by our preconceived notions of how wonderful and just and righteous we've always been told the Almighty is, the book has a startling and revolutionary impact. When we take an honest look at God's portrait in the Bible, apparently, His character is surprisingly like that of an unjust, capricious and even terrifying tyrant. God-as-Saddam is not so off-the-wall for a clear-eyed Christian or Jew as our cultural indoctrination would lead us to believe.
But the empirical question about the moral nature of the particular God that people cite as moral bedrock is really secondary. Even if the Biblical portrayal of God were as morally untroubling as one could imagine, even if His own conduct were beyond reproach and His every commandment consistent with our own deepest moral sense, a logical problem would remain in the way of "God said it" being an adequate bedrock for a moral philosophy.
Even if we set the morally problematic character of the specific God-of-the-Bible aside, the logical problem of the "God said it" problem that remains is this: to decide that this God, or any God, is good requires an independent basis for assessing goodness. Either God is good by definition --which requires us to say that even a monster like Saddam could define goodness if He created the universe, which is to define goodness away-- or we require an independent definition of the Good. Thus the fundamentalist’s declaration that we should obey the commandments of an all-good God requires that he have some other criterion for defining goodness besides that "God said it." And so we are back to where we began, with the question: what is it that makes something morally good?
The same is inescapably true for recourse to any other external authority. To allow an external authority to define goodness for us is inevitably an evasion of the moral question. If we say, "To obey the law is good," are we saying that the law defines the good, or are we declaring that there are no bad laws? But history is full of terrible laws by any humane standard of morality --such as laws requiring citizens to be complicitous in murder, laws allowing torture, laws calling for punishing people who express beliefs most of us now regard as good and true-- and if we allow all law to define the good we are left with nothing worth calling a morality. No bedrock there.
Similarly, saying that "Adherence to traditional moral values is good," is either to say that there can be no such thing as a morally questionable tradition or to say that we have submitted to a moral test those particular traditions that we choose to follow, and that they have passed that test. The first alternative seems indefensible in the face of facts --such as traditions that require the genital mutilation of little girls, or the blood sacrifice of first-born children, or giving the lord of the manor first rights with the brides of his serfs-- and thus becomes equivalent to abdicating the moral question. To adhere blindly to tradition is to take the position, "I'm not going to worry about what is morally good. I will simply obey authority, whether it's good or bad." To evaluate authority, however, requires that one employ independent moral criteria. And this independence means that one's morality is no longer founded on authority.
But if no authority can be one's moral bedrock --not God or law or tradition-- then what can?
<em>
Pick your own. </em>
In the history of civilization, authority has been a force of great power-- sufficient power indeed that the capacity even to think of questioning the rightness of authority has emerged only in some times and places. Ours is certainly one of them. In Western civilization, in the wake of the Enlightenment, the right of the individual to employ his or her own reason to challenge the dictates of authority has been well-established for some centuries, now, even if there remains a powerful force of traditionalist backlash as epitomized by religious fundamentalism.
If "God said it" is the arbitrary pseudo-bedrock of the religious traditionalists, "You don't have any right to lay your moral trips on me" is the arbitrary and self-contradictory abdication of the whole idea of moral bedrock of a large swath of the counter-culture.
At Prescott College in Arizona, in the mid-1970s, I encountered this kind of moral relativism among my students. This was an era of anti-authoritarian social rebellion, something with which I had considerable sympathy. But I was uncomfortable with the philosophical sleight of mind by which "Thou shalt not" had been transmuted into "Do your own thing."
"Hey, that's a value judgment," a student would say if I were to articulate a moral critique of some aspect of our social or political scene. If I offered some judgment of some group's life-choices, I might hear, "That's not for you to decide for them. Everybody's got to decide what's right for them." Let's examine that proposition, I would suggest. And then we did. Morality, these students would explain, is a subjective matter. "It is not something out there. It's just your feeling. So no one can judge anyone else's morality. If it's right for you, then it's right." I'd ask: "You mean that any moral position is just as valid as any other?" That's right.
So, if we were to imagine the Cosmos as ruled by some Being with a character like Saddam Hussein, would we then say that obedience to such a God was morally good? I can imagine saying that it is prudent --just as I can imagine keeping my head down if I lived in Saddam's Iraq-- but if you asked me what is "good" about upholding a murderous regime, say, or ratting on my neighbors, or seizing what belongs to someone else, all because I am ordered by a tyrant to do so, I could not find any acceptable answer. No "clonk" of bedrock just because the Guy with the power commands it. To say otherwise would be to say that might makes right, which is to say that we are not talking about right at all.
This notion of God-as-Saddam is irrelevant, the fundamentalist will argue, because that's not what we've got-- we've got a good God. But this position has two problems. The less important is the empirical one; the more important the logical one.
The empirical problem is that the record of the Bible provides plenty of troubling evidence about God's moral character. I am willing to grant that the great preponderance of the moral law as handed down through the Scriptures of the Judeo-Christian tradition --from the Ten Commandments on through the Golden Rule-- has a quality that is largely consistent with my sense of what is morally right. Don't murder, don't steal, treat other people as you would like to be treated-- I've tried to inculcate such moral precepts in my own three children. But if we are talking about moral bedrock, "most of it" isn't good enough. If God commanded us to do what is morally wrong even once, "Because God said so" would be disqualified as a sufficient guide for doing what's right.
But for some of my callers, the fact that it says in the Good Book that God said it means that he did. For them, either of the second two options --God commanding evil, or the Bible misreporting God's Truth-- fatally undermines their fundamentalist belief in their possession of moral bedrock, so they feel compelled to make the case for the first option. So callers have explained to me why it was right for the children of Israel to seize a city and to put to the sword every single man, woman and child. "They were idolaters, you see. And God wanted his Chosen People to be free of their pernicious influences." If this is the way an all-good being would operate, I say, what's so good about goodness?
But the empirical problem with God's goodness goes considerably deeper. Jack Miles has written an extraordinary book, <em>God: A Biography</em> , which systematically explores the character of God as it unfolds through the Old Testament. He does it in a straight-forward and low-key way, so undramatically that I've read favorable reviews of the book in conventionally religious publications. But if one reads the book with an open mind, unfettered by our preconceived notions of how wonderful and just and righteous we've always been told the Almighty is, the book has a startling and revolutionary impact. When we take an honest look at God's portrait in the Bible, apparently, His character is surprisingly like that of an unjust, capricious and even terrifying tyrant. God-as-Saddam is not so off-the-wall for a clear-eyed Christian or Jew as our cultural indoctrination would lead us to believe.
But the empirical question about the moral nature of the particular God that people cite as moral bedrock is really secondary. Even if the Biblical portrayal of God were as morally untroubling as one could imagine, even if His own conduct were beyond reproach and His every commandment consistent with our own deepest moral sense, a logical problem would remain in the way of "God said it" being an adequate bedrock for a moral philosophy.
Even if we set the morally problematic character of the specific God-of-the-Bible aside, the logical problem of the "God said it" problem that remains is this: to decide that this God, or any God, is good requires an independent basis for assessing goodness. Either God is good by definition --which requires us to say that even a monster like Saddam could define goodness if He created the universe, which is to define goodness away-- or we require an independent definition of the Good. Thus the fundamentalist’s declaration that we should obey the commandments of an all-good God requires that he have some other criterion for defining goodness besides that "God said it." And so we are back to where we began, with the question: what is it that makes something morally good?
The same is inescapably true for recourse to any other external authority. To allow an external authority to define goodness for us is inevitably an evasion of the moral question. If we say, "To obey the law is good," are we saying that the law defines the good, or are we declaring that there are no bad laws? But history is full of terrible laws by any humane standard of morality --such as laws requiring citizens to be complicitous in murder, laws allowing torture, laws calling for punishing people who express beliefs most of us now regard as good and true-- and if we allow all law to define the good we are left with nothing worth calling a morality. No bedrock there.
Similarly, saying that "Adherence to traditional moral values is good," is either to say that there can be no such thing as a morally questionable tradition or to say that we have submitted to a moral test those particular traditions that we choose to follow, and that they have passed that test. The first alternative seems indefensible in the face of facts --such as traditions that require the genital mutilation of little girls, or the blood sacrifice of first-born children, or giving the lord of the manor first rights with the brides of his serfs-- and thus becomes equivalent to abdicating the moral question. To adhere blindly to tradition is to take the position, "I'm not going to worry about what is morally good. I will simply obey authority, whether it's good or bad." To evaluate authority, however, requires that one employ independent moral criteria. And this independence means that one's morality is no longer founded on authority.
But if no authority can be one's moral bedrock --not God or law or tradition-- then what can?
<em>
Pick your own. </em>
In the history of civilization, authority has been a force of great power-- sufficient power indeed that the capacity even to think of questioning the rightness of authority has emerged only in some times and places. Ours is certainly one of them. In Western civilization, in the wake of the Enlightenment, the right of the individual to employ his or her own reason to challenge the dictates of authority has been well-established for some centuries, now, even if there remains a powerful force of traditionalist backlash as epitomized by religious fundamentalism.
If "God said it" is the arbitrary pseudo-bedrock of the religious traditionalists, "You don't have any right to lay your moral trips on me" is the arbitrary and self-contradictory abdication of the whole idea of moral bedrock of a large swath of the counter-culture.
At Prescott College in Arizona, in the mid-1970s, I encountered this kind of moral relativism among my students. This was an era of anti-authoritarian social rebellion, something with which I had considerable sympathy. But I was uncomfortable with the philosophical sleight of mind by which "Thou shalt not" had been transmuted into "Do your own thing."
"Hey, that's a value judgment," a student would say if I were to articulate a moral critique of some aspect of our social or political scene. If I offered some judgment of some group's life-choices, I might hear, "That's not for you to decide for them. Everybody's got to decide what's right for them." Let's examine that proposition, I would suggest. And then we did. Morality, these students would explain, is a subjective matter. "It is not something out there. It's just your feeling. So no one can judge anyone else's morality. If it's right for you, then it's right." I'd ask: "You mean that any moral position is just as valid as any other?" That's right.
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