Tag Archives: morality

Thinking About Meaning While Weeding the Garden

22 Wednesday Mar 2023

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

The extraordinary bouts of rain to fall upon California has led to an extraordinary bounty of weeds forcing themselves about the plants in my yard. Today, in a respite between showers, I was freeing a decorative plant from the infestation of some noxious greenery. And as one does, I thought of how the weed worked like cancer, sucking up the nutrients and water meant for the plant I desired.

This led me to consider the deep ecological thinking that humanity is like a weed or cancer upon the earth. Thus, humanity needs to be culled – or perhaps even abrogated for the good earth.

From that I thought: What is the harm which comes to the earth if human beings are well but some other life on earth is not? Whatever answer I come to is the answer of a human being. If l land some pagan ecology and think that “life” itself is what matters, and human beings are merely the froth of this wave, it is still a human being who has this thought. No grass or caterpillar or goose is worried about this metaphysical existential problem.

The meaning exists in the human mind.

This leads to an interesting quandary for those make humanity the culprit, the cancer upon the globe.

Let us assume an utterly materialistic understanding of nature, by this I mean whatever forces there may be within the universe, the universe is the boundary of reality. There are molecules in motion.

In such a universe, meaning a useful fiction of the human mind; but “meaning” has no existence independent of the human mind. We cannot go exploring through the universe and find meaning somewhere. Meaning has no existence beyond a human being thinking, “This has meaning.”

If this so, destroying human beings would destroy the tenuous meaning which could exist. It would also “mean” that the world was meaningless. There is no moral difference between gushing mercury into an oyster bed and tending to a rose or rescuing a baby from a fire.  Some person may make some sort of judgment about one thing or the other, but the moral value would extend no further than the judgment.  Meaning is a function of human intelligence.

Right or wrong would simply be a majority opinion.

And if human beings were all gone, the world would be meaningless.  Racoons hunting crayfish might still happen, but it would have no moral value: that moral value could only come from human beings.

The thought that well, life will go and perhaps better without us, is merely a thought of a human being. But the value of “life” and “better” and whatnot do not exist. That is a nonsense statement neither true nor false.  It is a vapor which would disappear without a human being to think it.

The other possibility is that there is some meaning independent of the human mind. For such an abstraction to be exist, it would necessarily exist in another mind.  Meaning is a kind of way an intelligence thinks about an event. For meaning to something other than an incident abstraction of human beings, but to a fact; meaning must be grounded in something other than human beings thinking of it.

What sort of mind would suffice to ground meaning as an objective fact?

20 Saturday May 2017

Posted by in law, Philosophy, Politics

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

When people speak about separation of religion and politics, particularly “legislating morality” as improper, they display a stupendous ignorance. 

For example, why is it wrong to lie to get someone’s money? Well, that is fraud. Why is fraud wrong? Because it is lying? Why is lying wrong? The answer to that question is itself a moral proposition. 

Morality is either a type of aesthetics or is based upon some sort of transcendent proposition: some morals may be more functional than others (everyone lying would soon destroy all commerce), but even caring about the effects is a moral decision.

The basic premises of Western law have a theological basis – a legislative morality: Consider this proposition:

God has ordained contracts of various kinds, Melanchthon wrote, to facilitate tate the sale, lease, or exchange of property, the procurement of labor and employment, and the lending of money and extension of credit.” God has called his political officials to promulgate general contract laws that prescribe “fair, equal, and equitable” agreements, that invalidate contracts based on fraud, duress, mistake, or coercion, and that proscribe contracts that are unconscionable, conscionable, immoral, or offensive to the public good. Melanchthon was content, for the most part, to state these general principles of contract law in categorical form. Occasionally he applied these general principles to specific cases. He condemned with particular vehemence loan contracts that obligated debtors to pay excessive rates of interest or entitled creditors to secure the loan with property whose value far exceeded the amount of the loan, unilateral labor and employment contracts that conditioned a master’s obligation to pay on full performance from the servant, and contracts of purchase and sale that were based on inequality of the exchange.

Law and Revolution II

Howard J. Berman

Harvard University Press 2003

Kierkegaard on the Impossibility of a Secular Morality

27 Monday Mar 2017

Posted by in Ethics, Kierkegaard, Philosophy, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

His own own experience, rather than any theoretical requirements, convinced Kierkegaard that man’s real predicament is to be placed between a thoroughly esthetic way of living and a thoroughly religious one. No permanent footing can be maintained on a purely ethical basis, and in this respect Kierkegaard stands opposed to all efforts to make morality self-sufficient. Ethical principles are intrinsically ordained to the religious outlook, and a secular morality is either unaware of its religious significance our only esthetic discourse about being moral. The genuine alternatives are still the world and the cloister, the esthetic and the religious kinds of existing. Recollecting his own battle at playing the Romantic genius and also the tremendous upheaval involved in his return to Faith, Kierkegaard was inclined to state the contrast is being between “perdition and salvation”–between which there can be no compromise for reconciliation.

James Collins, The Mind of Kierkegaard (London: Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd., 1954) 46-47.

An easy illustration of this can be found when one tries to establish even the most “self-evident” forms of ethics: Why is murder wrong? If you say, Because killing is wrong? The next step is “Why?” Because you killed a person. “Why is it wrong to kill a person?” Where does one stop searching for an answer to the “why”? Wherever one stops implies a religious position (to use Kierkegaard’s term) or an ethical (I simply find this distasteful).

The implicit esthetic morality of many people is apparent in the tremendous transformation taking place in ethics (particularly sexual ethics) in the West — and the speed in which it has happened. It seems that a great deal of public ethics was merely a matter of taste. Indeed, the “religious” positions of many people seem to be little more than taste and convenience.

If A Man Die

10 Saturday Dec 2016

Posted by in Preaching, Sermons, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , ,

A sermon truly begins with the listener: Why should I listen to this man? He asks for my attention, why should I care? (Now, note, I am not saying that the Words of God should not be carefully attended to. That is unquestionably true.)

When one comes to a sermon, the preacher has the duty to presenting the great matter of eternity before him. Baxter rightly wrote, “I preach as never sure to preach again, and as a dying man to dying men.” But too often sermons which begin with cute, often funny stories, cannot command that sort of gravity. If the sermon merely begin a joke, how do we ever get to matters of eternal consequence?

This introduction by J.D. Jones certainly opens up a matter of profound gravity. He also immediately makes it to Scripture. He asks a question and answers with the Text. He also demonstrates by means of a contemporary reference (WWI), that the question is immediately relevant:

IF A MAN DIE—

THERE is no question to which the human soul more eagerly desires a clear and sure answer than this one: “If a man die, shall he live again?” It is an old, old question. Job asked it long ago in an agony. The one fact he could see, the one fact which admitted of no challenge or dispute, was the tragic fact of death. “Man dieth and wasteth away; yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he? As the waters fail from the sea, and the river decayeth and drieth up, so man lieth down and riseth not: till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be roused out of their sleep.” And yet, if the grave really was the end, if death was the very last word, it seemed to Job that life was just a tangled web of injustice and wrong, and that there could not be a wise and good God at the heart of things. That sorely-tried patriarch passionately desired an assurance that man should live again. He almost demanded a future life to rectify the wrongs and waste and distresses of this. There is entreaty, there is pathetic appeal, there is passion and desire in this question: “If a man die, shall he live again?”
Thousands and tens of thousands of people are asking that same question with a similar urgency in these days of ours. The awful harvest which death has been reaping in the Great War has made it the question of questions for a vast host of bereaved fathers and mothers and wives and lovers. They want to know—what of their beloved dead? Is a grave in France or Mesopotamia, or beneath the waters of the North Sea the end of them, or shall they live again?

J. D. Jones, If a Man Die (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1918), 9–12.

Do the Commands of God Create Moral Duties for Those Who do not Believe in God?

01 Tuesday Nov 2016

Posted by in Ethics, Francis Schaeffer, Romans, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , ,

I will post a review of the remarkable book Did God Really Command Genocide by Paul Copan & Matthew Flannagan. For the moment, I offer the following addendum to a discussion and objection to the Divine Command Theory of ethics (the understanding that something is morally obligatory because God commands it to be so, whether or not human beings understand the source of that obligation).

An objection discussed on page 155 of the book raise by philosopher Wes Morriston:

In order to successfully issue a command, one must deliver it to its intended recipients. This brings us back to the problem of the reasonable nonbeliever. On the fact if, God has not succeeded in speaking to her. And since she is a reasonable non-believer, God has not even succeeded in putting her in a  position in which she should have have heard a divine command. How then, can she be subject to God’s commands? How can her moral obligations be understood by reference to what God has commanded her to do?

Copan and Flannagan respond to the argument in terms of its philosophical merits. What I propose to add to their argument is a Scriptural response. Paul in Romans 1 & 2 directly addressed Morriston’s argument. In Romans 1, Paul explains that human beings actively seek to suppress the knowledge of God and his ethical condemnation of human sin:

18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. 19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. 21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.

Romans 1:18–21 (ESV). Yet, despite the fact that human beings (the “reasonable nonbeliever”) deny any knowledge of God or God’s moral communication, human beings are well aware of the moral content of God’s communication: “Though they know God’s righteous decree” (Rom. 1:31). The “reasonable nonbeliever” apprehends God’s moral communication (“righteous decree”) in their conscience (which is exactly the basis upon which Morriston and other atheists seek to condemn the God of Scripture for being immoral). Paul makes clear that God’s moral authority is not premised upon the unbeliever being consciously aware of God having issued the command. The unbeliever’s moral conscience is a sufficient ground:

12 For all who have sinned without the law will also perish without the law, and all who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law. 13 For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified. 14 For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. 15 They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them 16 on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.

Romans 2:12–16 (ESV). Francis Schaeffer in his book The Church in a Post Christian Culture puts it this way:

Let me use an illustration again that I have used in other places. If every little baby that was ever born anywhere in the world had a tape recorder hung about its neck, and if this tape recorder only recorded the moral judgments with which this child as he grew bound other men, the moral precepts might be much lower than the biblical law, but they would still be moral judgments. Eventually each person comes to that great moment when he stands before God as judge. Suppose, then, that God simply touched the tape recorder button and each man heard played out in his own words all those statements by which he had bound other men in moral judgment. He could hear it going on for years—thousands and thousands of moral judgments made against other men, not aesthetic judgments, but moral judgments. Then God would simply say to the man, though he had never heard the Bible, now where do you stand in the light of your own moral judgments. The Bible points out in the passage quoted above that every voice would be stilled. All men would have to acknowledge that they have deliberately done those things which they knew to be wrong. Nobody could deny it.

Francis A. Schaeffer, The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer: A Christian Worldview, vol. 4 (Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, 1982), 41–42.

 

Oswald Chamers, The Psychology of Redemption.2

27 Monday Jan 2014

Posted by in 1 John, Anthropology, Biblical Counseling, Hamartiology, Matthew, Oswald Chambers, Romans, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

In his Psychology of Redemption, Oswald Chambers writes:

“For by Him were all things created . . .” (Colossians 1:16). Did God then create sin? Sin is not a creation; sin is the outcome of a relationship which God never ordained, a relationship set up between the man God created and the being God created who became the devil. God did not create sin, but He holds Himself responsible for the possibility of sin, and the proof that He does so is in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. Calvary is God’s responsibility undertaken and carried through as Redemption. The essential nature of sin is my claim to my right to myself, and when sin entered in, the connection between man and God was instantly severed; at-one-ness was no longer possible.

One may contend that Chambers has put the emphasis in the wrong place: “sin is the outcome of a relationship”. Isn’t it true that, “sin is lawlessness” (1 John 3:4) and “sin is not counted where there is no law” (Romans 5:13)? Without question, sin does entail ethical and relational aspects. But we must understand that such ethical considerations are grounded one’s relationship to God.

Consider, for example, the paragraph in 1 John 3 which contains the phrase “sin is lawlessness”. Notice first that John uses the ethical dimension to demonstrate the relational defect:

4 Everyone who makes a practice of sinning also practices lawlessness; sin is lawlessness.
5 You know that he appeared in order to take away sins, and in him there is no sin.
6 No one who abides in him keeps on sinning; no one who keeps on sinning has either seen him or known him.
7 Little children, let no one deceive you. Whoever practices righteousness is righteous, as he is righteous.
8 Whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil, for the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil.
9 No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God’s seed abides in him, and he cannot keep on sinning because he has been born of God.
10 By this it is evident who are the children of God, and who are the children of the devil: whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is the one who does not love his brother.

Notice also that John restates and summarizes the nature of sin in the final clause of verse 10, “the one who does not love his brother”. Jesus himself grounds the ethical dimension of the law in the relational aspects, both toward God and toward human beings:

34 But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together.
35 And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him.
36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?”
37 And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.
38 This is the great and first commandment.
39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” Matthew 22:34-40.

What about Paul stating that without law there is no sin? In that same letter to the Christians in Rome, Paul writes: “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law” (Romans 13:10).

Jesus First

18 Sunday Mar 2012

Posted by in Acts, Biblical Counseling, Discipleship, James Montegomery Boice, Preaching

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

 

 

In chapter 12 of his sermons on the book of Acts, James Montgomery Boice writes of the confrontation between the apostles and the Sanhedrin following the instance on which God had miraculously freed the apostles in prison as set forth in Acts 5. He immediately returned to the temple area and began to teach. Sanhedrin, angry and confused, demanded that the apostles appear before them again. Verse 28 records at the Sanhedrin reminded them of the strict orders to stop teaching about Jesus. Peter, in verse 29, famously responds with, “We must obey God rather than men.” Peter than preaches the basic gospel message to the Sanhedrin:

 

Obviously, the reason the disciples began with the kerygma (the basic facts of the Gospel: the life, death, burial and resurrection of Jesus) is that they knew, as we should also know, that a person must first come to Jesus Christ as Savior before he or she can take on the burden of his teachings. It is true that we cannot have one without the other. But less a person first believes in Jesus as his or her Savior and thus has the new life of Christ within, that person cannot even begin to live the life Christ commanded. As a matter of fact, unless you first pressure sin and find forgiveness, you only go into increasing sin, which is what these leaders did.

 

The apostles did not tell the Sadducees to “do onto others as you would have others do unto you.” Instead they told him to repent of their sin and come to Jesus Christ for cleansing from it. That is the message we have been given for perishing world today.

 

Boices’s observation has practical effects from biblical counseling. One must never attempt to counsel an unbeliever to lead a life pleasing to God. The unbeliever must first come to God in Jesus Christ and be reconciled to God,  before he or she can receive the Spirit and thus lead a life pleasing to God. Christian life is not merely a life of moral behavior. Rather, a life pleasing to God is a life lived to the glory of God. Such a life can only be had but one is received eternal life through Jesus Christ.