Christian historian Dr. Wallace Marshall and I are debating whether or not enough evidence points to the existence of a god. For background and format, and Dr. Wallace’s opening statement, see entry one. For subsequent entries, see index.

We’re now on to Dr. Marshall’s “Moral Argument” for the existence of God. Here Marshall is responding to my latest reply.


That the Evidence Points to God (XII)

by Wallace Marshall, Ph.D.

Dr. Carrier has read me inattentively in alleging that on my view, “there are no consequences to being moral or immoral,” and that God “doesn’t expect anyone to decide any behavior in light of [these consequences].” I plainly stated otherwise: “It is of course true that consequences factor heavily into our moral choices.” My objection is to reducing all our moral reasoning, and especially the “oughtness” we encounter in the moral realm, to evaluation of consequences.

Indeed, a theist has good reason to be confident that following the “Golden Rule” [1] will ultimately have the best consequences, though as I stated in our discussion of Dr. Carrier’s Argument from Indifference, the connection between moral conduct and external consequences is not so tight that a person would pursue the right simply to achieve those ends (Providence trains us otherwise).

Hence one must bring in the intangible, inward good of “self-satisfaction” (or whatever one wants to call it). A theist is of course operating within a context of ultimate meaning, and he would derive this satisfaction from the knowledge that he is living in accord with the Creator of all things, and thus with the chief end of human existence. He would know that his inward sense of satisfaction ultimately derives from this relationship and is rooted in the very foundation of existence. Nevertheless, this consequence does not, for the theist, negate the blank authority of moral imperatives, as if their demands were contingent on him being able to forecast a sufficient degree of self-satisfaction by adhering to them.

On Dr. Carrier’s moral theory, we must ask whether this motive of self-satisfaction will be easily maintained, to where one could conclude that an idealized group of rational, well-informed atheists would, on the ground of consequential reasoning alone, conclude to a universalized Golden Rule. That is the first hurdle.

Dr. Carrier’s idealized group would have to recognize that their inward sense of “satisfaction” (from living the GR) that Dr. Carrier lays such emphasis upon, and the parallel inward pain of guilt, are precisely the kinds of emotive states evolution would have “invented” in order to increase compliance, especially since most humans are unskilled in elaborate consequential reasoning. They would recognize that the GR-impulse was originally limited to a band, and later to a tribe, and in each case was likely “selected” for its value in helping the band or tribe survive, reproduce, and even conquer other tribes that lacked this GR-impulse. At some point, perhaps with the help of social or even religious conditioning, it morphed into a universalized GR.

Now as Dr. Carrier observed in his first reply, evolution only “fumbles” towards its goals. A species may develop a characteristic that is neither helpful nor unhelpful to those goals. More critically to this inquiry, it may develop a characteristic that is at first helpful, but when exaggerated runs counter to evolution’s goals, like the gigantic antlers of the extinct Irish elk. The idealized group could not, accordingly, uncritically privilege their sense of self-satisfaction in following the GR but would have to consider whether their sentiment for a universalized GR might have outlived its evolutionary usefulness. This uncertainty would by itself weaken the consequential motive of self-satisfaction.

We can further imagine the group hypothesizing that while it would benefit from extending a GR ethic to a select group of other tribes, it might be disadvantaged by extending it to tribes that are too weak to be a threat or to contribute external goods to them, and that in order to achieve a society more satisfying to itself in the long run, members of the group must mortify their moral intuition to a universalized GR and heroically endure the resulting sense of guilt and dissatisfaction. As Peter Haas has shown, this is precisely what the Nazis did. [2]

Dr. Carrier will of course object, “But the Nazis were misinformed in their calculations!” And so we would all want to say, but it would hardly be the first, or essential thing we would want to say, which would rather be, “I don’t care what your calculations are: what you are doing is evil!”

But the forcefulness of that response derives from a confidence that an atheistic evolutionary framework undermines or at least substantially weakens. Moreover, we can easily imagine less violent, or even non-violent, versions of Nazism that would be harder, or even impossible, to overturn on merely informational grounds, but that we would still feel were fundamentally evil.

So it seems difficult to conclude that an idealized group of rational, informed atheists will, through consequential reasoning alone, arrive at the universalized GR intuition we hold dear.

If we turn to the second, and larger, challenge of securing obligation from individual persons, the prospects for an atheistic moral theory become even more dim. Dr. Carrier chooses to dismiss rather than answer my illustration of Jacques the art thief, but I think it shows very well why even if we can establish the utility of a limited (intra-tribal or selectively inter-tribal) GR ethic (which would not be hard to do), there will still be many instances where it will be anything but clear that a particular individual will be prudentially obligated to adhere to that ethic, all the more so if the individual becomes aware of the likely evolutionary roots of the GR impulse.

Individual goals, desires, and satisfaction-states are simply too diverse for consequentialist reasoning to even pragmatically shoulder the entire burden of moral obligation. Moreover, an essential feature of moral experience is that fundamental duties demand our compliance, regardless of our desires and calculations.

Regarding the evidence from anthropology, sociology, and moral psychology, Dr. Carrier mistakenly infers that the widespread use of consequential considerations in moral motivation implies that prudential, “if-then” considerations are the sum, root, and ground of moral experience. If he thinks they are, let him answer Richard Joyce’s challenge to produce even a single instance of a culture that “employs only hypothetical imperatives as its principal normative framework” (Dr. Carrier strangely notes this word, “only,” but then proceeds to write as if it weren’t in Joyce’s sentence!).

Dr. Carrier may think informed humans should outgrow notions like “transgression,” “moral outrage,” “guilt,” and retributive punishment, [3] and respectively replace them with miscalculation, pity, foolishness, and keeping ourselves safe. If atheism were true, such a replacement would indeed seem necessary, but the resulting framework simply will not track with fundamental features of our moral experience, and for that reason, cannot qualify as a truly moral theory. Nor will those replacements (the first three, at least) prove to be psychologically livable.

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Such is Dr. Marshall’s latest reply on the Moral Argument for God. 

Continue on to my answer.

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[1] To reiterate what I noted in my first entry, I am using “golden rule” (“You shall love your neighbor as yourself”) as shorthand for various descriptions of universal fairness.

[2] “Far from being contemptuous of ethics, the perpetrators acted in strict conformity with an ethic which held that, however difficult and unpleasant the task might have been, mass extermination of the Jews and Gypsies was entirely justified. . . . the Holocaust as a sustained effort was possible only because a new ethic was in place that did not define the arrest and deportation of Jews as wrong and in fact defined it as ethically tolerable and even good.” Critical notice of Peter Haas, Morality after Auschwitz: The Radical Challenge of the Nazi Ethic (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), by R. L. Rubenstein, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 60 (1992): 158.

[3] Theories of punishment are either (broadly speaking) “retributivist” or “consequentialist.” Consequentialists hold that a punishment is justified if it produces some greater good. Retributivists hold that a punishment is just only if the offender deserves the punishment, and that this notion of just desert must be met before any considerations of “greater good” come into play. For a lucid discussion (and compelling defense of the humaneness of the retributivist position), see C.S. Lewis, “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” and “On Punishment: A Reply to Criticism,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1970), 287-300. Readers can access a scanned copy of those essays here.

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