Journey Homeward to the Habitual Self

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Belief

I cannot bring myself to study much, as following the tradition of years past I have burned myself out so thoroughly at this point that the scarcest little thing will totally distract me. So in lieu of content, and in lieu of being a good student, I come bearing music.

Bringing it Together: Euthyphro and Serial Killers

We live in a world of incomplete knowledge. In fact, it is actually impossible to attain complete knowledge – if you don’t believe me, ask Gödel, or even worse, ask Heisenberg. This doesn’t mean that some things cannot be proven – it can be proven, for example, that the world is round, or that the sun burns by hydrogen fusion, or that you are looking at a computer screen or fancy-schmancy cell phone screen while reading this. But it does mean that there are some things which cannot be proven, and others which we do not have the capacity to determine with certainty. We make sense of this part of the world (which is much of it) by determining probabilistically what is most likely to be true: it is likely, for instance, that Hilary (Rodham) Clinton is a democratic candidate for president who will not have sufficient delegates to win her party’s nomination, while it is unlikely that she is a secret service agent from Jupiter’s moon Io with the capacity to time-travel and, thus, win the democratic nomination and enslave humanity to the Ionians (that is, citizens of Io, not of a chain of islands off the coast of Greece). And it is likely that the sun is out today because the earth has rotated so that the ground I am standing on is struck by its rays, and unlikely that I am imagining it and that the entire phenomenon of “sun” is unique only to me.

When it comes to matters of religion, we also have incomplete knowledge. There are many holy books, all of them containing what appear to be errors and mistakes, all of them with defenders pointing out that these aren’t really errors or mistakes. Muslims, Christians, Orthodox Jews, and adherents of every religion (and even adherents of no religion) all feel at times a euphoric connectedness to the divine, and offer this as proof of their claims. All have histories that are dark at times, brilliant at others. All have intellectual men and women throughout time who have defended them. As to the existence even of God, there is no mechanism he has left us by which to test and see his existence, and he does not make himself physically manifest to each individual being. So when it comes to claims concerning religion, we are left to determine, according to some set of metrics for truthfulness, what seems most likely among a wide number of possibilities.

Let us suppose that there is a God who desires to and does communicate with men and women in the world, and we want to determine which of the competing claims about God is true. This is where Euthyphro’s dilemma comes in. If morality is what it is, and is acknowledged by God, then we may leverage the moral claims of the various religions and systems of philosophical thought to determine which is most likely to be true. If, on the other hand, morality is determined only by what God “likes”, or happens to choose, then moral claims (possibly the most important ramification of a religion) are irrelevant in our search for religious truth.

Consider the following scenario: It is the evening of September 10, 2001. You are speaking to what you once thought was a very nice middle-eastern man but who has now you tied up in his apartment because you came over to borrow some sugar at the wrong time and intruded on an argument between him and his friends about what was happening tomorrow and who was going to drive to the airport. In trying to dissuade him from what he is about to do, you plead with him, saying, “But would God really want you to kill so many people – children visiting their parents, those who are Muslims themselves with loved ones even in your home country?”

“Do not question the will of Allah!” he replies. “It is his will that the infidels be brought to repentance or be destroyed. They have already failed to come to repentance by wallowing in this country’s greed and rebellion to the will of Allah which is given in the Holy Quran.”

“But would Allah really want you to murder?” you say. “Is he so vindictive to want you to kill? Are you sure you are understanding him right? Is this who God is, so evil?”

“Allah is not evil. What he says is right because the will of Allah is always right.”

Do you see how futile it is to reason about God if it is only God’s might that creates morality? It is impossible to determine between one system of belief about God versus another except through factual accuracy – and as I already noted (all too briefly), all systems I know of have some explaining to do, all being radically placed in that area of the world in which our knowledge is woefully incomplete. If might makes right, it is impossible for a Christian to stake Jesus’ divinity on the quality of his character, and likewise impossible to impugn other systems for the character of their god(s). A priori, fundamentalist Islam is just as valid an option as any form of Christianity. Reverse the above situation: assume that you are the terrorist, raised in a background of fundamentalist Islam, saturated with it, and someone is trying to reason with you. Assuming Allah’s will is all that makes an act right or wrong, there is no way for you to leave your beliefs for moral reasons, for there is no such thing as moral reasons to consider. And so I think that, in order for human beings to able to determine to any degree who God is in a world of incomplete knowledge, morality must be at least to some extent determinable apart from God. This does not necessarily mean that all of morality must be determinable by human means (this is part of the problem of incomplete knowledge), but some of it must be.

Consider another scenario: I wrote about a show I’ve been watching about a serial killer who kills other killers. If morality is determined by what God chooses, then this serial killer is not by his nature any more or less moral than God himself, just less powerful. In fact, in a strict interpretation of double predestination Calvinism, this serial killer may actually be more benevolent than God – choosing his victims based on their own benevolence or malevolence (and thus promoting benevolence), whereas God chooses his victims and friends based on no criterion at all concerning the individual at stake (thus promoting… what?). That’s not to say there aren’t Calvinistic answers to this charge (though I personally find them weak), but it is to say that in defining moral rightness strictly as what God chooses, we can rapidly end up with a human being – even a disturbing or morally ambiguous one – having greater benevolence toward humanity than God! (Necessarily, this means that benevolence is divorced from morality.) This is particularly true if, alongside double predestination, we take a punitive view of hell.

All this is to say, in order to know about God when we ourselves live in a world of incomplete and imperfect knowledge, and in order to know about a God who is good to humanity, I believe the answer to Euthyphro’s dilemma must be that God loves that which is holy because it is holy. But I hold that this does not necessarily mean that humanity always has the capacity to determine holiness (or moral rightness, I am here using the terms interchangeably) in all cases, and this leaves me with another, subtly different dilemma which I feel inadequate to solve.

Social Justice and Candy

First for social justice: Trade As One. Do something with your discretionary funds that will help those who are living out the true horrors of human existence. The answer to this is not, I believe, to merely throw money at the poor (the liberal response), nor to ignore them (the conservative response), but to incorporate the least of these into the very systems which have brought so many of us such great relief and good in our earthly careers. For someone like me, the journals are the most enticing. But for God's sake, make choices for the benefit of real men and women.

Secondly: Candy for your brain. Bart Ehrman and NT Wright talking theodicy; there are few discussions among men (=humankind, a word I wish would not have supplanted wer) that I would find more provoking, stimulating, or satisfying. Not satisfying in the sense that it solves any problem, but satisfying in the sense that an excellently cooked meal is satisfying.

Ethics and Morality Cont'd

In response to the unusual number of replies to my last post: I guess whenever I want to generate discussion and comments I should post about serial killers. Thanks for all the responses.

I'm staying at home sick today, skipping out on my one class for the day in hopes that staying home will lead to a better tomorrow (considering that I have a midterm tomorrow, which I am spending much of my time here studying for, I am very much hoping for a better tomorrow). Which also reminds me that it looks as though the courses I need to take and the variety I need to choose from are offered only on a Tuesday/Thursday schedule, with the odd and daunting result that it looks like my fall semester will include six hours of class on Tuesday/Thursday and none at all on Monday/Wednesday/Friday. Though I understand professors' desires to only teach two days a week, I don't remember signing up for this when I enrolled at the university.

But on to what I wanted to post about. I want to bring up two quotes from the discussion on morality. There were two comments I want to bring up first, the first from MR, the second from Brandon:

To summarize, simply doing the right actions is insufficient. I should seek to follow God's commandments AND my heart should be in it. Love is NOT just deciding to do good to another. As my friend from Minnesota says, "Love is taking JOY in the good of another."

Well, if a person follows the rules but feels nothing toward God, or has no relationship with God, then His following the rules is pretty much meaningless. ...(long ellipsis)... What is the intentions for doing good? I think that determines ones morality.

This causes me to ask what God's goals (or our goals, since we are the ones talking about this and I haven't had my God phone-line installed yet) are in saying that doing good is insufficient. If doing good is insufficient, that means there is something that morality desires beyond doing good to another; what is this?

Though I wasn't in the original post talking specifically about Christian Bible-based morality (and though it is obviously related), this brings out another important question: are the commands of God grounded in any principle(s)? That is, one just states that a person ought to follow God's commands and from the heart, and that this is moral behavior. But why follow God's commands - because God says so or because of what the commands themselves are? Is it more than a language-game, set up and directed by a divine being? What makes it moral other than divine fiat, or is there anything else? Socrates phrases the question more beautifully than I can and much earlier than I ever thought of it:

Is that which is holy loved by the gods because it is holy, or is it holy because it is loved by the gods?

Socrates lived in a polytheistic culture, but this can be very easily translated into a monotheistic question by dropping the 's'. (And don't take this as too much of a plug for Socrates - brilliant though he was, I can't imagine someone more annoying than someone who always seems to be a step ahead of you and you can never quite tell if he's being sincere or not.) The above quotes from MR and Brandon seem to tend toward the answer that something 'is holy because it is loved by God' rather than 'God loves it because it is holy', but I don't want to put words in people's mouths, so I want to make sure. Additional questions that may help in answering this one are: could God have commanded other than what he did? and would it still be right to follow the behavior of the commands if we did not have them?

On an aside, why do I have so many gay commentators? Oh right, I suppose that makes sense - that tends to happen when one sets up a blog to deal with issues of one's sexuality - but thanks to Abigail for commenting and adding another perspective. Not that I am unappreciative toward any of you others' comments and posts! Now I must return to the lambda calculus from whence I came.

Darkly Dreaming David

I ought to be reading a particular piece of ex-gay literature. I've been meaning to - it has been sitting for some time on the to-read stack on my bookshelf. But truth be told I find it rather boring and uninteresting, simple and easily understood and taken apart. On the other hand, I've recently found a television show that I find very engaging, quite complex, and offering many pieces to a puzzle which must be puzzled through, even though the show may be difficult to watch at times. I debated whether or not to disclose which show, but I think without naming it there is plenty of information to find it if you want.

The show is about a serial killer. He was raised by a city cop, after he witnessed as a young child the brutal murder of his mother and was taken in by the state. His adopted father saw early on who he was - a sociopath who had an insatiable urge to kill (as he started out with small animals, as these things often go). Rather than getting him professional help, his father taught him to "channel" this desire - that is, he gave him and devoted much time to teaching him a Rule, the crux of which is to blend into society and to make sure to only kill deserving people. One might wonder what "deserving people" means - and so far from what I've seen, it includes only other murderers who have escaped the law - be they pedophiliac rapists or general rapists or reckless and careless people or sociopaths like our pro(?)tagonist himself.

So yes, it is a dark show.

Though there are many interesting aspects to the show - not the least of which is whether it is anywhere near morally acceptable to submit even the worst of the worst to such a death, or our antihero's day-job as a forensic analyst - what I want to bring up is the fact that the he himself never ponders questions about morality. He is extremely intelligent, but being given an unhindered view of his mind, he looks at his behavior almost as a disinterested observer. He does not hold to the Rule - to only kill bad people and track them to make sure he is right about their badness - out of any sense of moral obligation. He does not consider following the Rule to be "good" or the murder of an innocent to be "bad". He simply acknowledges his bloodlust, and acknowledges the Rule, and his life is an optimality problem in which both of these must be satisfied - no questions asked. He is very mechanical in this.

Disregarding the inherent morality of the Rule (let's assume for the moment that it is morally right), is it moral for him to follow it while himself disregarding questions of its morality? That is, given a Rule that is morally right, does following this Rule make one a moral person, even if one is unaware of the morality of the Rule itself?

Careful how you answer, for there are consequences both ways. If it is only following a right Rule that makes one a moral person, this means that a robot (or a computer program for that matter) may be moral; it means that indoctrination of a human with a Rule can be a moral process; it means that intelligent thought has nothing to do with morality. Conversely, if following a Rule does not make one moral but one must understand the morality involved, this means that even the most moral behavior may not make one a moral person; and that to inculcate morality one must not tell someone what is right and wrong but cause them to think about it; and that dispensing or even having rules - religious or otherwise - can be non-critical with regards to personal morality.

So what do you think? Does following a moral Rule make a person moral? If not, what is it that makes one a moral person?

All I Need

I am particularly lonely, and somewhat heart-broken too, tonight. So I sit here on the couch, hugging a pillow (sad, but true), my finger hovering on the DVD remote ready to play one of my favorite Planet Earth episodes, thinking about what it is that I am looking for in life.

At one point the honest answer to that would've been acclaim as an excellent Christian. Not that I'd've given that answer, mind you - not even to myself. Arrogance in the guise of piety. And then I came to gradually think I wanted to serve people, something which I thought for a long time stemmed from my Christianity and meant that I was to be a missionary. I still desire to serve, but I no longer think the reasons for it are so obvious as I once did, having now known too many Christians who don't have this as a goal, and too many non-Christians who do. But motivations, mine and others, are another matter and perhaps deeper than I can handle.

But what is it that I would find to be satisfying in life? Truth be told, there are a few things on that list. I should of course love to settle down with someone. It would bring me great joy to have someone with whom I could simply be, and all the other indescribable emotions of intimacy and security. I would love to have a family. I would love to tell and invent stories for no greater reason than having a shared mythology with husband and kids. And then beside that, I simply want to serve people. I don't want to live in the nicest neighborhood of whatever city I find myself in, removed from even the reminder of economic discomfort. I want to open my life to those who are poor and overlooked. I want to take care of, as much as I can, the real needs of those who have them, and do not have them met. And I want a partner in that crime.

Looking at that, a lot of it is to pour myself out for others to a degree to which I am not now.

God knows I'm a long way from this. Particularly service - and I need to be more careful of what groups I'm investing my time in to help me realize that. But if this is my hope, what should I do in the meantime? These are some of my thoughts this evening.