Thinking Christian

There are two groups of people in the world: those who divide the world into two groups of people, and those who do not.

No, really, there are two groups of people in the world with respect to moral opinions: moral realists and moral relativists. Broadly speaking, moral realists believe that there are at least some moral values that are objective. Objective means (as William Lane Craig says) that these values would hold as valid or true even if nobody on earth agreed with them. Moral relativists, in contrast, generally hold that all moral values are generated or constructed out of persons’ or cultures’ beliefs. They may believe there is a certain kind of reality to moral values, that values are not arbitrary; but this reality is the product of individual or social beliefs, not some ultimate source beyond human culture.

The following is a True/False Quiz that anyone can take. Do you consider the following statements to be true or false?

1. (T/F) All moral values are entirely constructed or produced out of persons’ or cultures’ beliefs.

If you answered False, that’s it for you on this quiz. If you answered True, please continue:

2. (T/F) Let us assume that everybody in some cultural grouping G believes that some behavior B expresses a good and valid moral value. (It doesn’t really matter what B is.) For that culture, at that time and in those conditions, B is good.

3. (T/F) Another cultural group H may disagree with G on this, but nevertheless for GB is still good; for cultures may validly hold different opinions on moral values. H’s disagreement with G does not make B bad or wrong in itself, it only makes it bad or wrong for H.

4. (T/F) Suppose there is no group H that disagrees that B is good. Then everyone would be in group G, and would agree that B is good. For that time and in those conditions at least, B is therefore good for everybody. It is a universal good in the sense that it is universally shared by all persons then living, though not in the sense that its value comes from somewhere beyond the persons who have made it a value.

5. (T/F) In most cultures of the world, the Holocaust of WW II is regarded as having been a severe moral evil.

6. (T/F) If, however, Hitler had won the war, and if he (and his followers) had been able to exterminate or brainwash everyone who thought the Holocaust was evil, then the situation would be like that of (4), where every person in the world agreed that the Holocaust was morally good. (This example also follows one given by W.L. Craig.)

7. (T/F) In that case, the Holocaust would be correctly regarded by the remaining population as having been morally good.

Self-check: compare your answers to (4) and (7).

We’re not done yet, though…

8. (T/F) Some remaining persons (call them Group H again) may think it was morally evil to massacre and/or brainwash the dissenters. Those persons themselves (the members of Group H) could conceivably be brainwashed and/or killed by the others (Group G), so that every remaining person would then be a member of group G and would believe the following:

(a) To exterminate the Jews was a morally good goal.
(b) To kill and/or brainwash those who disagreed with (a) was morally good.
(c) To kill and/or brainwash those who dissented from (b) was also morally good.

9. (T/F) With no Group H, and with every person alive believing that 8(a), 8(b), and 8(c) were morally good, then those moral beliefs would indeed be universally good, taking “universal” as described in (4).

10 (T/F) In other words, relativism could coherently lead to a possible world, as philosophers term it, in which the Holocaust was morally good, and where brainwashing or killing off all possible dissent was also morally good–universally so, in fact. This moral good, as suggested in (9), would rest on a much stronger social foundation than, say, the current common Western belief that slavery is wrong. It would in fact be more clearly good than current beliefs that slavery is wrong.

Self-check: compare your answers to (9) and (10) with your answer to (4).

And that suggests the following final item in our short quiz:

11. (T/F) It would violate a solidly established universal moral norm, and would rightly be regarded as reprehensible, to suggest that is wrong to kill dissenters just for believing that persons ought to have the freedom of their beliefs.

From this you see one reason I am not a moral relativist.

Truth In the Fire
I have written appreciatively twice of Dallas Willard lately. Now I turn to his article, Truth in the Fire: C.S. Lewis and Pursuit of Truth Today: Publications: The Independent Institute. Originally delivered as a lecture ten years ago at the C.S. Lewis Centennial at Oxford University, this paper springboards from Lewis’s understanding of Truth, and attacks being made upon it in Lewis’s time, to a more contemporary discussion of the same issue. (Dallas Willard is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California.)

Everything we believe, everything we understand about the world, hinges on this issue. A colleague of mine has written a book (now out of print), God Is the Issue. I do not intend to say that Truth is above God, or more important than God. But God is consistently identified in his Word as the source of Truth, and as Truth himself (2 Samuel 22:32, Psalm 18:30, John 5:31-32, John 7:18, John 14:6, 1 John 5:20).

The Truth that is in God is multi-faceted: it involves his personal faithfulness, his consistency, his keeping his word, his integrity. It also involves what is technically, somewhat coldly perhaps, called propositional truth: that which allows us to affirm or to deny that something is in fact true in a meaningful sense (see Deuteronomy 18:22, 2 Samuel 7:28, John 19:35, Acts 26:25, 2 Corinthians 7:14).

Propositional truth itself is “In the Fire,” the phrase Willard uses in the title of his paper. Postmodern-leaning Christians often dismiss it: “How can you reduce the truth of God to mere propositions?” But that of course is a straw man. To insist on the reality of propositional truth is not to deny the other various aspects of God’s truth, any more than to insist that birds can fly is to deny they can sing. God can be (and is) personally faithful, at the same time that statements regarding him (or other subjects) may be true or false.

Rumors of Relativity
Of course the question is not raised only in regard to God. Propositional truth is denied on general terms, or is accepted only on the understanding that it is not objective. Truth is relative, they say. As Willard puts it:

In the face of present attitudes, however, even earnestness about truth—also about goodness and beauty—is definitely uncool. It might be tolerated in a Freshman. But he or she would be expected to wise up quickly, and might pay a stiff price for not doing so. The idea of devoting one’s life to truth, goodness or beauty is now quaint if not ridiculous, on the campus as in the corporation. They are not considered to be objective realities against which human life is or can be measured.

To encourage you to read the whole article, I’ll pick up a few points from it. First, on this belief that all truth is relative, Willard disagrees, to put it mildly. I stand with him.

All this puts us in position to see that, while belief is relative—a fact or statement is believed only if someone believes it—truth is not relative. One believes something, one does not truth it or fact it. Again, we can and should experiment with this. Try getting your car to run by believing gas is in your tank. Or by also enlisting others to believe it, or by generating a social movement in favor of it.

Pilate’s Question
But what do we mean by “truth?” Willard dares (such audacity!) to suggest an explanation, including,

When the object of our belief or statement is as we believe or state it to be, when it “matches up” to that object in the familiar way already indicated by cases, our belief or statement is true. Truth is just this characteristic of “matching up.” Otherwise our belief or statement is false. Truth and falsity are, then, objective properties of beliefs and statements….

For a belief, thought or statement to be true is simply for its subject matter to be as it is represented, or as it is held to be, in that belief, thought or statement. When we confirm that a hitherto unconfirmed belief or statement is true, we do not create the relation (correspondence) it actually has to what it is about, any more that we create the fit of a wrench to a bolt head by placing the wrench on the bolt head, or the fit of a door to a frame by putting the door in the frame….

Moreover, truth, as we have seen in the case of fact and reality, is totally unyielding in the face of belief, desire, tradition and will. There is no such thing as a belief or statement whose quality of truth or falsity is modified by mere belief or disbelief, desire or aversion, habit or tradition or social practice or professional opinion, or will and intent. We state it once again: belief is relative, as are our perceptions, but truth is not. Truth is a relation, a “correspondence,” but not one that depends upon belief or attitude….

A dignitary such as Pontius Pilate or a university professor can well say, rhetorically, “What is truth?” But that is never accepted as a response from a child being interrogated about vanished cookies, nor will a child accept it as an explanation of a broken promise. They know what truth is very well, even though, as they also know, it is not easy to determine in some cases. —Is it true there is a Santa Claus, for example, or a tooth fairy?

Is that so complicated, now? Well, of course there are issues attending this matter of truth, which Willard acknowledges in his paper. But the central foundation of it was never challenged for century upon century. It was only when men began to doubt everything except the evidence of their senses that they began to doubt such a thing as truth exists. Intuitively it is obvious even to a child; but intuitions don’t boil in a beaker, and they don’t generate a satisfyingly measurable electrical field, so the empiricists thought they must not be real. Never mind that (as Willard points out) they could not determine they were unreal without depending on their being real.

Why It Matters So
And why is this such a crucial matter? Simply this: without the ability to speak a true statement, to affirm a true proposition, then one cannot say things like,

• “God is love.”
• “Jesus Christ is the Word of God become flesh, full of grace and truth.”
• “Eternal life is found in Jesus Christ.”

These things cannot either be affirmed or denied. They are without content. They may be opinions, but they can be neither right nor wrong.

Further, without the ability to affirm something as true (even potentially), the following cannot be said, even to disagree with them:

• Opinions about God are without content.
• They may be opinions, but they can neither be right nor wrong.
• These things cannot be said, even to disagree with them.
• Nothing in fact can be affirmed as actually true, or denied as being actually false.

I hope you’ve noticed this is turning self-referential, as the philosophers put it. A self-referential statement is one like, “The sentence I am now writing is ten words long.” That happens to be true, if I counted right. Here’s another self-referential statement. “The statement I am now writing is false.” That one is not only false, it is incoherent, impossible; it cannot be true unless it is false; it cannot be false without being true. A better description for it is nonsense.

In a similar sense, if all truth is relative then the last several bulleted statements above are true, but if they are true propositions, then there are no true propositions. They are in the same condition as “This statement is false.” If they are true, then they are false.

Desperate Separation
One who denies truth denies all affirmations, all denials, all discourse. The result is not only to remain desperately separated from God, also to create a whole new kind of separation from each other. We can talk to each other, but your words and mine have no common referent, no meaning in common. You speak your language and I mine, but we can have no shared understanding: for there is no objective reality out there for us to share in.

It is a philosophy of absurdity. More grievous than that, though, it is a philosophy of utter alienation.

Hat tip (three weeks ago, saved until I had time to work on it): Victor Reppert

I gave this talk at Seaford Baptist Church on Wednesday, April 23, 2008. Some portions have been edited out because they’re not applicable to a wider audience.

[podcast]http://www.thinkingchristian.net/wp-content/DoWeReallyKnowItsTrue.mp3[/podcast]

 

 Do We Really Know It's True? [33:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This talk on Views of Truth was given on March 9 to the Chapel at Kingsmill. I regret that I had no control over the recording method–the microphone was far from the front of the room, so there’s room noise. It’s still audible and listen-able in spite of that, though.

[podcast]http://www.thinkingchristian.net/wp-content/audio/viewsoftruth.mp3[/podcast]

 

 Views of Truth [34:10m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

“Who am I to say someone else’s morality is wrong?” the moral relativist asks. It is a stance of humility that he takes, at least on the surface; for how could he be so arrogant as to say what another’s values ought to be?

I choose the male pronoun here because of recent dialogues about this with Paul and doctor(logic) (also male), on this website. At one point Paul had this to say about something I had just written on relativism (my emphasis added).

PAUL: Tom wrote:

TOM: It changes the whole meaning of morality from right or wrong to powerful or powerless. That may not seem wrong, incoherent, or illogical to you, but it absolutely turns my stomach.

PAUL: Yes, I agree about the definition change to the extent that absolute morality disappears, and all that’s left is 1) within an accepted moral code, people say “A is moral” or “B is not moral,” but 2) when looked at from an incompatible culture, or better, from above both cultures, what is right is defined by those with power (the relativistic Golden Rule is “He who has the gold makes the rules”), However, that doesn’t mean that people don’t feel like things are right and wrong, which is why the words are used as if absolutes, even by relativists, but, strictly speaking (or, from the vantage of being above two competing systems), it does come down to a matter of power as to which system will prevail, or, better, seem to be absolute from within one culture.

This is where this “humility” leads. Feelings rule–the feelings of the powerful, that is.

Even one-to-one it is this way. The humble relativist may not decide another’s morals, but he will certainly insist on determining his own. He will not be subject to anyone or anything in making this choice.

Christian humility is nothing like this. It hesitates not a moment to acknowledge there is truth, truth that applies to all persons; but this is not our own truth. It comes from the One to whom all of us must be subject. We are, each of us, tested by it. Through it we come to know our need for grace, for none of us scores perfectly on this test.

Humility is in the reception of grace, not in the rejection of truth.