Apologists have said, ad nauseum, that atheists are guilty of presupposing a priori the truth of metaphysical naturalism in both their arguments and in their responses to theistic arguments. Phillip Johnson is especially notorious for this in his criticisms of evolutionists. And N.T. scholars like Gary Habermas, William Lane Craig and Craig Blomberg do this when criticizing their liberal critics, like Antony Flew, Gerd Ludemann, and especially John Dominic Crossan.
While there have been nontheists who may be guilty of that charge, naturalistic atheists don't need to presuppose naturalism in order to make their case. But in this article I wish to focus on a different point. I believe that the Christian focus on presuppositions reveals a rhetorical strategy that has been extremely effective for Christians. As someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about metaethics, it occurred to me that it might be fruitful to turn the tables on proponents of theistic metaethics. The more I learn about atheistic metaethics, the more it seems to me that many proponents of theistic metaethics are just blatantly presupposing, a priori, that ethics cannot be secular. In other words, some proponents of theological ethics rule out the possibility of naturalistic ethics a priori.
For an example of how such an objection to theistic writings on religion and morality would look, I went to arn.org, one of the official sites for evolution denier Phillip Johnson. At that site, I found an article titled, "Evolution as Dogma: The Establishment of Naturalism," which sounded like an article concerned exclusively with the alleged a priori presupposition of naturalism in science. And indeed it was. So using Johnson's words as a starting point, I developed my own 'paraphrase' of Johnson, except that I directed the accusation of bias against theists who discount secular ethics. Here is what I came up with:
Theistic metaethics is so deeply ingrained in the thinking of many educated people today that they find it difficult even to imagine any other way of looking at things. To such people, theistic metaethics seems so logically appealing that only a modest amount of confirming evidence is needed to prove the whole system, and so they point to the "objectivity" of morality as virtually conclusive. Even if they do develop doubts about, say, whether God's commands are needed for moral duties, their belief that an objective morality requires a theistic grounding is undisturbed. Because they believe morality is objective and that their Bible tells them that God must be sovereign over everything that exists, it follows that morality must be dependent upon God if it is objective.
The same situation looks quite different to people who accept the possibility of moral values and duties which are not dependent on God. To such people, who include both nontheists and theists, the idea that God could make cruelty morally valuable or torture a moral duty is absurd. From their perspective, there is no relevant difference between saying, on the one hand, that an all-powerful God can do anything which is logically possible and, on the other hand, that a morally perfect God can do anything which is morally permissible. If it is no violation of God's sovereignty to say that God cannot do the logically impossible (such as make it both true and false that unicorns exist), then it should equally be no violation of God's sovereignty to say that God cannot make the immoral (such as the slaughter of the Canaanites) moral just by issuing a command. But this is unimportant to a thoroughgoing devotee of theistic metaethics, who feels that apologetics is doing just fine so long as it can offer an foundation for ethics that is merely consistent with theism, no matter how implausible.
Victory in the dispute over secular vs. religious ethics therefore belongs to the party with the cultural authority to establish the ground rules that govern the discourse. If the autonomy of ethics is admitted as a serious possibility, theistic metaethics cannot win, and if it is excluded a priori theistic metaethics cannot lose.
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