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News

The seven fatal flaws of moral relativism

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Moral relativism is the view that moral values and moral duties do not exist in reality, but only exist as opinions in people’s minds. When you ask a moral relativist where the belief that stealing is wrong comes from, he may tell you that it is his opinion, or that it is the opinion of most people in his society. But he cannot tell you that stealing is wrong independent of what people think, because morality (on moral relativism) is just personal preference.

So what’s wrong with it?

I found this list of the seven flaws of moral relativism at the Salvo magazine web site.

Here’s the summary:

  1. Moral relativists can’t accuse others of wrongdoing.
  2. Relativists can’t complain about the problem of evil.
  3. Relativists can’t place blame or accept praise.
  4. Relativists can’t make charges of unfairness or injustice.
  5. Relativists can’t improve their morality.
  6. Relativists can’t hold meaningful moral discussions.
  7. Relativists can’t promote the obligation of tolerance.

Here’s my favorite flaw of relativism (#6):

Relativists can’t hold meaningful moral discussions. What’s there to talk about? If morals are entirely relative and all views are equal, then no way of thinking is better than another. No moral position can be judged as adequate or deficient, unreasonable, acceptable, or even barbaric. If ethical disputes make sense only when morals are objective, then relativism can only be consistently lived out in silence. For this reason, it is rare to meet a rational and consistent relativist, as most are quick to impose their own moral rules like “It’s wrong to push your own morality on others”. This puts relativists in an untenable position – if they speak up about moral issues, they surrender their relativism; if they do not speak up, they surrender their humanity. If the notion of moral discourse makes sense intuitively, then moral relativism is false.

I sometimes get a lot of flack from atheists who complain that I don’t let them make any moral statements without asking them first to ground morality on their worldview. And that’s because on atheism morality IS NOT rationally grounded, so they can’t answer. In an accidental universe, you can only describe people’s personal preferences or social customs, that vary by time and place. It’s all arbitrary – like having discussions about what food is best or what clothing is best. The answer is always going to be “it depends”. It depends on the person who is speaking because it’s a subjective claim, not an objective claim. There is no objective way we ought to behave.

So, practically speaking, everyone has to decide whether right and wrong are real – objectively real. If they are objectively real, that means that there is a right way for human beings to behave, and a wrong way for human beings to behave. It means that things that are really objectively wrong like rape are wrong for all times and all places, regardless of what individuals and societies might think of it. In order to rationally ground that kind of morality, you have to have a foundation for it – a cosmic Designer who decides for all times and places what the conduct of his creatures ought to be. And then our moral duties are duties that are owed to this Designer. It is like playing football or playing a boardgame – the person who invents the game decides the rules. But if there is no designer of the game, then there are no rules.

Without a designer of the universe, the question of how we ought to act is decided by people in different times and different places. It’s arbitrary and variable, and therefore it doesn’t do the job of prescribing behavior authoritatively. It’s very important not to get involved in any serious endeavor with another person or persons if they don’t have a sense of right and wrong being absolute and fixed. A belief in objective moral values is a necessary pre-requisite for integrity.

News

On the Beatitudes, John MacArthur is wrong, Sinclair Ferguson is right

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I stayed home from church on Sunday and decided to watch sermons (and birds, through the window) while doing weights and then cardio on my recumbent bike. I wanted to hear a good sermon on the Beatitudes, so I started with John MacArthur and moved on to Sinclair Ferguson. I thought it might be worth making a post about it, because it’s an important point.

So, to start with, I will say that I don’t have an ordinary living room like most hoomans, with, like, “furniture”. I have a chin-up / dip station, a flat/incline/decline bench, two adjustable dumbbells, a folding floor mat, a recumbent bike, and a TV hooked up to a laptop for streaming. My living room is just for working out, and watching streaming videos. Usually, it’s about men’s issues like Chisha Zed and Emily King, wargame gameplay like Example of Play and Taff in Exile, or sermons.

So, I started out with coffee and a fiber smoothie (e-mail me for recipe), and then this sermon from John MacArthur:

MacArthur says:

The third reason we ought to study the Sermon on the Mount is that it’s the only path to true happiness for Christians. If you want to be truly happy and filled with the Spirit, you don’t chase mystical experiences, pursue elusive dreams, or hop from meeting to meeting trying to catch something in the air. Instead, to know happiness, blessedness, bliss, joy, and gladness, you simply study the Sermon on the Mount and put it into practice. Additionally, I believe we should study it because it’s the most powerful tool for evangelism. Living out the Sermon on the Mount will astonish the world—it’s the greatest evangelistic tool there is, as this kind of life transforms and draws others to Christ.

I disagree with John MacArthur here. Christians should use the method of evangelism that Jesus used, which is to present evidence to non-believers.

Here is a great article by Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason, and he looks through the Bible to see how people in the Bible evangelize.

Koukl starts with the actions of Moses in the Exodus:

Note the pattern: a powerful evidence (miracles, in this case), giving the people knowledge of God, in Whom they then placed their faith. Knowledge—some level of certainty—went before belief in each of these cases.

Then Koukl goes on to the New Testament:

Jesus gives us the same lesson we find in Exodus. He proves something that can’t be seen—the forgiveness of sins—with evidence that can be seen—a dramatic healing. Jesus heals “in order that you may know.” Once again, the concrete evidence allows the doubters to know the truth so they can then trust in the forgiveness Christ could give.

It’s easier for a pastor to say to people in the pews that they don’t have to study any evidence to evangelize. Then there’s no work for them to do, and people like to hear that message. People love testimonies and changed lives, because it’s easy.

One problem with this approach is that people in all different religions have testimonies and changed lives. Mormons have that. Even atheists can tell you that atheism improved their happiness. So that’s not going to work. But the bigger problem is what Greg said: the testimony / changed life approach is not Biblical. The use of evidence is Biblical. And we have loads of evidence available.

Here is a list of evidences that a mature Christian should be able to say SOMETHING about:

  • origin of the universe
  • fine-tuning of the initial conditions for permitting life
  • origin of life (building blocks AND information)
  • molecular machines
  • sudden infusions of information in the fossil record
  • habitability
  • scientific evidence that the mind is not the brain
  • the moral argument
  • a good argument from prophecy, like Psalm 22
  • a case for the reliability of the gospels
  • a case for the resurrection based on evidence accepted by a wide range of Christian and non-Christian scholars
  • a case for the archaeological accuracy of the Bible

And so on! There’s more, but I want to get to Scottish pastor Sinclair Ferguson.

I feel I should say that my dear departed best friend and wise advisor Murdina would love that I am listening to her beloved Scottish pastors. I even know how to translate Scottish rubbish to real English. “Warrum” means “warm”. “Girrul” means “girl”. “Worruld” means “world”. “Churruch” is “church”. Etc. Etc.

Anyway, here’s Sinclair Ferguson’s sermon:

At 8:28, Sinclair Ferguson says:

The Beatitudes describe a countercultural transformation that reflects the beauty of Jesus in our lives, but this transformation often leads to conflict and persecution in a world that opposes such values. Jesus emphasizes this in a postscript to the Beatitudes, warning that this new way of life will bring believers into opposition with the world, resulting in suffering.

This reality deeply impacted the Apostle Peter, who initially struggled with the idea of a Christian life marked by persecution, longing for a Christ without a cross. Yet, by the end of his life, in his first letter, Peter encourages Christians facing trials, saying, “Do not be surprised by the fiery trial that is coming upon you, as though something strange were happening to you.” He came to understand that belonging to Jesus Christ and His kingdom naturally invites the same opposition Jesus faced, marking a defining characteristic of the citizens of God’s kingdom.

This is a much more accurate and realistic statement of what will happen to you if you start taking discipleship to the Lord Jesus seriously.

An authentic Christian life is not going to be marked by “happiness” as the world understands it. On the contrary, Christians are not only vulnerable to ordinary suffering, but they also will face social disapproval and even persecution for following Jesus. That’s the normal Christian life. This should NOT be surprising for followers of Jesus. We should expect to experience the same loss and persecution that Jesus experienced.

In fact, staying faithful through suffering or privation is more likely to impress non-Christians.

The only way that the normal Christian life is ever going to make you happy is if you rejoice at experiencing the same sort of sadness that your Boss did. Like if your reputation at work suffers because you disagree with same-sex marriage. The only happy thing about it is that you can look back on your loss with Boss, and give him a fist-bump. You were faithful, and it cost you something to do it.

News

Can a person believe in both God and Darwinian evolution?

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The term for a person who believes in fully naturalistic evolution but who also believes in God is “theistic evolutionist”.

Terrell Clemmons takes a look at one organization of theistic evolutionists “Biologos”, and makes a distinction between their public statements and the real implications of their public statements.

Here is the PR / spin definition of theistic evolution:

Evolutionary creation is “the view that all life on earth came about by the God-ordained process of evolution with common descent. Evolution is a means by which God providentially achieves his purposes in creation.” This view, also called theistic evolution, has been around since the late nineteenth century, and BioLogos promotes it today in a variety of religious and educational settings.

And here is the no-spin definition of theistic evolution:

As Dr. Stephen Meyer explains it, the central issue dividing Bio-Logos writers from intelligent design theorists is BioLogos’s commitment to methodological naturalism (MN), which is not a scientific theory or empirical finding, but an arbitrary rule excluding non-material causation from the outset. “Unfortunately,” Meyer writes,

methodological naturalism is a demanding doctrine. The rule does not say “try finding a materialistic cause but keep intelligent design in the mix of live possibilities, in light of what the evidence might show.” Rather, MN tells you that you simply must posit a material or physical cause, whatever the evidence.

What this means, according to BioLogos’s own epistemology, is that God is objectively undiscoverable and unknowable—a tenet that sits squarely at odds with Christian orthodoxy, which has for centuries held that God is clearly discernible in the natural world (e.g., Romans 1:20). Obviously, this is theologically problematic, but Meyer also points out that theistic evolution faces problems from a scientific standpoint as well, as the technical literature among evolutionary biologists is moving away from the Darwinian mechanism.

Whenever I talk to theistic evolutionists, I try to stop them from talking about the Bible or their faith, because that’s not what is interesting to me. I don’t really care about their history as a religious person, or where they go to church, or who their pastor is. When I talk about origins and evolution, I only care about the science. What the ordinary process of scientific inquiry tells us about nature? Does nature have the capacity to create all of the varieties of life without any intelligent agency playing a role? Or, are there parts of nature that are similar to computer programs, blog posts, and term papers, where the best explanation of the effect is an intelligent agent choosing how to arrange the parts to achieve functionality?

I don’t accept molecules-to-man unguided evolution. This is not because I start with faith and let faith override the findings of science. It’s because I think that if you look at specific areas of natural history, there is clear evidence of intelligent agency, such as in the origin of life, or the Cambrian explosion. These effects in nature are well-studied and well-understood, and they look much more like the code that a computer scientist (like me) writes than the simplistic “order” created by wind erosion or crystalline patterns or anything the blind forces of nature could produce. Blind forces are observed to make small changes – short or long finch beaks, fruit flies with 4 wings and no balancers, bacterial resistances.

What’s also interesting is how often theistic evolutionists drop the theism but keep the evolution.

Consider this article about Stephen Matheson from Evolution News:

Biologist Stephen Matheson is a longtime critic of the theory of intelligent design. His extensive attacks on Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell, for one, ranged from the substantive to the trivial and personal. The tone was frequently…abrasive, and we responded at the time. With Arthur Hunt, Dr. Matheson has debated Dr. Meyer in a forum at Biola University. Formerly a professor at an Evangelical Christian school, Calvin College, Matheson is still listed as a Blog Author at the theistic evolutionary website BioLogos, where it notes that he enjoys “explor[ing] issues of science and Christian faith.”

Well, his theistic evolutionary explorations have now terminated. As he reports on his personal blog page, where he took a hiatus of more than five years along with a break from his teaching, he is “happily” no longer a Christian.

OK. Now that’s just one case, but what about Howard Van Till, also of Calvin College?

Salvo magazine takes a look at what he wrote in a recent book:

In what follows I shall use the term “naturalism,” when unqualified, to represent neither more nor less than the rejection of supernaturalism. Stated positively, naturalism is committed to the belief that all events that occur within this Universe are consistent with and adequately explained by the system of natural causes. This commitment necessarily entails the additional belief that the system of natural causes is fully adequate to account for all events that transpire. Focusing on the issue of the Universe’s formational economy, we can say that naturalism—as here defined -entails the RFEP.

He now gives presentations for atheist groups entitled “From Calvinism to Freethought”. Freethought is a euphemism for atheism.

Now, for the big three Western monotheistic religions: Christianity, Judaism and Islam. To deny supernaturalism IS to deny the robust theism present in the world’s big three monotheistic religions. Van Till denies theism as commonly understood now. And again, this isn’t because of the science. His heavy handed naturalistic assumption squashed out any kind of serious inquiry into areas like the origin of the universe, the cosmic fine tuning, the origin or life, the Cambrian explosion, biological convergence, so-called junk DNA, deleterious mutations, and so on. Places where you can see that naturalistic forces cannot do the creating that Van Till has faith that they can.

I don’t accept any kind of macro-evolution – evolution of body plans or organ types. My problem with evolution is not Bible-based, it’s science-based. If the science shows the need for intelligent causes, and I think it does, then I think that the naturalists need to adjust their assumptions and pre-suppositions to match the evidence. On the Internet have ball sorts of programs written in different computer languages. They are evidence for programmers. In nature, we have DNA and proteins and sudden origin of body plans, that’s evidence for a programmer, too.