Goodness Without God?

The question is whether we accept reality as pure matter or as the expression of a meaning that refers to us; whether we invent values or must find them. On our answer depends the kind of freedom of which we must speak, for two completely different freedoms, two completely different fundamental attitudes toward life, are involved here.

Principles of Catholic Theology, 72

Reflection – This is a very penetrating and simply put expression of the fundamental modern controversy. Do we invent reality, or is reality a given? Do we invent the moral law, or do we discover it? Is freedom to be the exercise of our wholly autonomous self-will imposing our ego upon a dead universe, or is freedom something more like a quest, an adventure, a bold setting out into an already existing meaning and truth?

It seems to me that it is one or the other. The truth is out there, or there is no truth except what we impose by our own strength. We have to be as clear about this as we can be in our minds. And it does come down to the question of God. If there is no God, how can there be a pre-existing moral law? Law must come from a law-giver.

When we speak of the laws of nature, we are using the word analogically; we simply mean that physical objects do the same sorts of things in the same sorts of conditions in a predictable fashion that we can utilize for technological advancement. There are no ‘laws’ of nature in the sense that there are laws of human conduct. If there is a true moral law, there is a true moral Lawgiver.

People will argue that you can be good without God, that lots of irreligious people manage to live good moral lives. It would be a fool’s game to dispute that. I would say though, that without God the word goodness becomes emptied of meaning. If there is no God, what is this goodness of which you speak?

Where does it come from? What is its rational basis? It really is true that without God all things are permitted. Civil society may choose to punish certain behaviors that violate the social order, but that cannot be the basis of what we mean by ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behavior. Do we really want to concede to the State the power to define morality?

Nor can it be morality by social consensus—like we all agree that adulterers are vile or something. Social consensus changes, and there are always minority opinions about virtually anything. Pedophilia has it defenders even now, as does incest, as does bestiality. Lots of people think it is just fine to lie and steal. We cannot have a rational moral theory based on social consensus, and it is against common sense to base it on civil and criminal law.

What else is left? Without a God who is the fashioner of reality and its ultimate adjudicator, there is no such thing as a moral law. And if there is no such thing as a moral law, then all things are permitted. And if all things are permitted, the ruthless and the powerful will continue to have their way with the rest of us. God and God alone provides a way out from this quandary.

Of course some will argue that this delivers us over to an even more debasing slavery to an even more ruthless and powerful being, except this time it is for all eternity and there’s no escape. This is why we cannot live a theistic life without a sense of God’s mercy and tender love. If this all-powerful all-good God who does indeed impose upon us the demnads of the moral law is not also all-merciful and all-compassionate, then we are indeed in a pickle. But He is, and so we are not so tragic. We are OK, really.

More than OK, we are free, then, to embark on the high adventure of reality, of good and evil, and to prevail with God’s help in the epic of life and its glorious challenge.

Moral Idiocy

Discussions about [the content of theology] remain isolated and losing skirmishes if no consideration is given to the question: Is there, in the course of historical time, a recognizable identity of man with himself? Is there a human ‘nature’? Is there a truth which remains true in every historical time because it is true? The question of hermeneutics is, in the last analysis, the ontological one, the question of the oneness of truth is the multiplicity of its historical manifestations.

Principles of Catholic Theology, 17

Reflection – OK, so we have headed into dry-technical-land here, after yesterday’s sensationalism of drugs and terrorism. It’s worth noting, mind you, that these dry technical questions, remote as they seem to be from our daily experience and thought, can be in fact the key underlying drivers of much contemporary mores and manners.

Here we have the whole question of truth and human nature. Is there such a thing? Do we have any access to it? Is it all just shifting sands and endless plasticity, ‘evolution’, not in the scientific sense but in the broad cultural usage of the term?

As I have said many times on this blog and will continue to say, this strict evolutionary relativistic plastic approach to reality has inherent incoherencies. There is no human nature… and you are wrong, aka ‘inhuman,’ if you say there is. Which is it? Either nothing is particularly human or inhuman or it is.

All standards are mutable and right and wrong are continually evolving… yet (for example) acceptance of same-sex marriage is heralded as ‘progress’ in human morality. Again, which is it? If there are no set standards, there can be no progress. What are we progressing towards? Progress by definition requires a fixed notion of the good. A football team can progress down the field towards the end zone only if that end zone stays put. If some mischievous genie kept moving the end zone after every play, now to the sidelines, then to the concession stands, then to the parking lot, then to the high bleachers, no touchdown will occur. Moving the goalposts—favorite sport of the blogosphere! But it makes any real discussion, and any real understanding of issues, impossible.

So it is in morality. We cannot get ‘better’, morally, unless there is a stable and true good to move towards. And if this stable and true good does not reside in a fixed human nature, some kind of abiding human reality that informs us of what we are to be and how we are to live, then where exactly does it reside? Social consensus? The state? Talk about building your house on shifting sands! Inexorable edicts of an absolute deity? Well, I have no real problem with that, but somehow I doubt that’s what advocates of same sex marriage and abortion rights envisage as the basis for their moral claims.

And so Ratzinger is arguing here that we need to talk on this basic level, lest our debates about this or that issue remain ‘isolated and losing skirmishes’. The question of hermeneutics—that is, the interpretation and understanding of things—resolves to questions of ontology—that is, whether or not there are any ‘things’, really to understand.

If there is no human nature, no abiding truth to man and his life in the world, then in reality we may as well kill and rape and rob and savage one another. We may not want to, because we’re socially conditioned to be nice people, but there’s no serious moral reason not to. We may not want to, because the state will arrest and imprison us, but there’s no serious moral reason not to.

As soon as we say that those actions are wrong, not just socially unacceptable or evolutionally unwise, we are committed to a fixed human nature or to a divine law imposed on us from outside, or both (which is the classical Christian understanding). One either becomes a moral idiot (in the precise etymological sense of that word) or must commit to some form of natural law theory.

I think what I have written here is strictly logical and based on no theological presuppositions or data. I think the conclusions I have come to are fairly unassailable. I would love for some atheist or relativist to come along here and (try to) explain to me why I’m wrong.

To Enter the Dance of Being

According to Sartre, human beings and things cannot have a nature. If they did, Sartre argues, there would have to be a God. If reality itself does not proceed from a creative consciousness, if it is not the realization of a design, of an idea, then it will always be a structure without firm contours, to be used as one will; but if there are meaningful forms in it that are antecedent to man, then there must also be a meaning that is responsible for their existence. For Sartre, the one unchanging certainty was that there is no God; therefore, there can be no nature. This means that man is condemned to a monstrous freedom; he must discover for himself with no norm to guide him what he will make of himself and of the world.

Principles of Catholic Theology, 72

Reflection – OK, so we’re done with the World Youth Day blogging, right? The Holy Father has the remarkable ability to speak of complex and deep matters in simple language, and this ability was on display at its heights at WYD in Madrid. But the man is nonetheless a world-class scholar, and so here we return to our ‘regular programming’ – which involves taking some of his heftier works and cutting them into small digestible pieces. You can thank me later.

So here he is grappling with Sartre and the whole rejection of ‘nature’ as a concept. Nature means, simply, ‘what something is’. The idea of human nature means that human beings are something specific, that there is a structure, a form to humanity that delimits us in some fashion.
It is crucial to note here that the reason Sartre and his followers (who are legion in the world today, even if they’ve never heard of the man and cannot name one of his works) deny nature is not based on any logical arguments. They deny nature because they want to do what they want to do when, where, and as they want to do it. The denial of God and nature is a first principle for them. Or to put it more accurately, the first principle they start with is that freedom is the highest value of man, and freedom can only mean doing exactly as you desire with nothing to stop you. From this first principle of action the rejection of God and human nature is the necessary first principle of theory.
If God exists, we cannot do just anything we please, not without violating something that is real. We do not live, if there is a God, with accountability and a responsibility to Being. Literally, we have a response-ability—we find ourselves in a world that exists, has a being which is structured, formed, purposed, meaningful, and we invited to and able to respond—we are response-able—to this reality.
To Sartre and so many post-moderns, this means we are not free. But, as Ratzinger points out in this passage, Sartre’s freedom is monstrous. We find ourselves in a shapeless bog of reality, no boundaries, no structure, total chaos, and our freedom consists in imposing our own will onto this chaos. The only freedom Sartre can recognize is the freedom God Himself enjoys: the earth was formless and void, and God said let there be light… this is for him the sole freedom. And what a burdensome and joyless freedom this is: Sartre’s major works have the cheery titles of Nausea and No Exit.
Ratzinger goes on to point out that there is another model of freedom possible for us—the freedom of cooperation, of entering into God’s reality, of embracing and uniting ourselves to the dance of Being already taking place.
It seems to me (and to Ratzinger) that these two models of freedom are mutually exclusive, and we really do have to choose between them. Either it means doing exactly what we want, or it means diving into the world as it is and shaping it, and ourselves, according to the truth, goodness, and beauty that is already present there. So take your pick: which is it?

Three Pounds of Meat?

Einstein pointed out that the relationship of subject and object is, ultimately, the greatest of all puzzles, or, more exactly, that our thinking, our mathematical worlds conceived solely in our consciousness, correspond to reality, that our consciousness has the same structure as reality and vice versa. That is the principal ground on which all science rests. It acts as though this were a matter of course, whereas, in fact, nothing is less so. For it means that all being has the same nature as consciousness; that there is present in human thought, in human subjectivity, that which objectively moves the world. The world itself has the same nature as consciousness. The subjective is not something alien to objective reality; rather, this reality is itself like a subject.

Principles of Catholic Theology, 71

Reflection – The brain weighs roughly three pounds. The activity that goes on in the brain is a combination of electric and chemical discharges, secretions, movements. If you are a strict materialist, you must maintain that somehow, these electro-chemical movements yield abstract speculative knowledge about quantum physics and creative insights yielding technological innovations. These same electro-chemical functions also result in poetry, music, humor, love, and a really good recipe for chocolate chip cookies (not necessarily listed in order of importance).

In short, we have consciousness. And this consciousness, which is the most direct experience each of us has in our subjective reality, corresponds to actual reality. Einstein pointed out, and Ratzinger is happy to repeat, that this is not an obvious, self-evident, or necessary fact.

Why should organic processes happening in three pounds of meat create an experience of subjective awareness and activity? Why should the actions of our mind correspond to the actions of inorganic matter, so that we can obtain understanding and even some mastery of it? Why should our minds tell us that 2+2=4… and it is so!

The correspondence of mind to matter, of our thoughts to reality, puts us fairly on the way to the rejection of materialism as a possible system. Materialists use rigorous logical proofs to prove that logic is merely a secretion of chemicals in the brain. They multiply words to prove that language is ultimately no different than the squawking of chickens or the soughing of wind in tree branches. They use their brains to prove that the brain is nothing but three pounds of meat in a fragile shell of bone and cartilage.

That our minds are able to extract the truth of reality at least suggests, if it doesn’t absolutely prove, that something like a mind has shaped the truth of reality in the first place. There is something (someone???) out there who has made the universe such that a rational mind can make rational sense of it, a sense which is proven in our capacity to shape reality according to our intentions and ideas.

Those who, in the words of Mark Shea, ‘worship the intellect rather than use it’ are incapable of seeing the flaw in materialist reasoning. But it is flawed. And the flaw, while it in no way, shape, or form proves the truth of Christianity, certainly does point in that direction. We believe in a God of Logos, of rationality and order. This belief factually corresponds to the most daily experience of every human being. 2+2=4.