Morality and Desire

A shallow faith is easily uprooted by a shallow atheism. And make no mistake, most postmodern atheism is every bit as shallow as most postmodern faith. The blame falls in large part upon the organized Church, which has ceded ground in public debates of philosophy, theology, science, and reason.

For the next several months I’ll be leading Adult Formation classes on Edward Feser’s Five Proofs of the Existence of God. This is not one of them. Below is a (very) simple introduction to the notion of apologetics and the appropriateness of reason (and science!) in the life of faith. See also The Yoke of Jesus by Addison Hodges Hart.

I hesitate to share this, because this topic is so crucial and my handling of it so bumbling. I am but a simple country preacher, who would do best to refer people to the publications of minds sharper, wiser, and more faithful than my own. Yet if I do not initiate this conversation with my parishioners, who will? Pop culture? YouTube? Prime time TV?

Proofs for God

Introduction

Reason, Faith, and Science

Reason, faith, and science, properly understood, do not and indeed cannot be in conflict, because the empirical sciences are a subset of reason, and reason is a subset of faith.

I'm referring to “faith” here in the broader philosophical sense: the conviction that life and the world around us have meaning, value, and purpose; the universal human surety that goodness, truth, and beauty exist, and are worth seeking above all else; and thus that the world is intelligible.

This predates reason, for it is the precondition of reason. I wonder if Neil deGrasse Tyson (say) ever stops to ask himself, “Why is it better to know? Why is truth preferable to falsehood, life preferable to death, morality preferable to immorality?” Or is he too busy critiquing people’s math?

Nota bene: What do we mean by God as opposed to gods?

Argument from Morality

A very crude argument that has become very popular of late (Ta-Nehisi Coates, Orange is the New Black, even Batman) goes something like this: “I don’t believe in God because I’ve seen too much injustice.” This is a simplified version of an old sticking point: theodicy, or “the problem of evil.” If God is all good and all powerful, why is there evil?

It’s easy to affirm two out of three:

• God is good and God is powerful, therefore evil isn’t real (karma)
• God is good and evil is real, therefore God isn’t powerful (process theology)
• God is powerful and evil is real, therefore God isn’t good (true horror)

But Christianity insists on the reality of all three. Paradox? Contradiction? Cross?

“I don’t believe in God because I’ve seen too much injustice.” But if there is no God, then whence comes our notion of justice, of right and wrong? Certainly not from within this world. If there is no transcendent God, then there is no transcendent justice. Thus justice is relative, an illusion, mere happenstance; thus injustice does not exist. The fact that we believe in good and evil, right and wrong, justice and injustice, points to God.

“If there is no God, then all things are permissible.” This thrilled Nietzsche, nauseated Sartre, and was for Dostoyevsky proof that everyone, deep down, believes in God—for only a madman believes that all things are permissible. Today we say everything is relative, which is the same thing. Is rape relative? Is slavery or murder or genocide? Of course not. There is a moral Law we cannot coherently deny, thus a moral Lawgiver.

Argument from Desire

All natural desires have a natural end. Hunger ends in food; desire in sex; curiosity in discovery. What then of our desire for transcendence—for goodness, truth, and beauty? What of our supernatural desire? If we have a soul-deep desire for something that cannot be satisfied in this world, does that not imply that we were created for another world?

“Natural theology, historically, was a confident discipline. A long line of thinkers from the beginnings of Western thought down to the present day—Aristotelians, Neo-Platonists, Thomists and other Scholastics, early modern rationalists, and philosophers of some other schools too, whether pagans, Jews, Christians, Muslims, or philosophical theists—have affirmed that God’s existence can be rationally demonstrated by purely philosophical arguments …

“The real debate is not between atheism and theism. The real debate is between theists of different stripes—Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, purely philosophical theists, and so forth—and begins where natural theology leaves off.”

—Edward Feser