Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

“This argument goes back to Plato, and it shows that appeals to God don’t help with the problem of grounding morality. Either God has his reasons and those are the reasons and reference to God is unnecessary, or God has no reasons and then morality consists of the arbitrary diktats of a God who we can’t even say is good.

“How, then, do we ground morality? Professor Fidley has done part of the work for us by identifying the fundamental adherence that each of us has to our own lives’ mattering. He’s right in claiming that we can’t live coherent lives without feeling that we matter, but that is quite a different thing from our actually mattering in some cosmic sense. We can’t get that automatically, just from our wanting to matter or feeling that we do matter. The upward move that Professor Fidley tried to make in the third prong of his argument doesn’t work.

“But I do think we can move horizontally outward, and that’s the direction to go to legitimate morality. I can’t look at other creatures who are committed to their existence and flourishing in the same way as I’m committed to my existence and flourishing without feeling a certain degree of identification, empathy, sympathy, compassion. The intuition that we ought to do unto others as we would have them do unto us flows naturally from this outward move. I don’t see any way to get it by some upward move. I presume, however, that you do, Professor Fidley. And I’d like for you to explain how, especially how you get around Plato’s argument, which is my question to you.”

“Indeed I do, Cass Seltzer. Not only do I think that what you call the ‘upward move’ can ground morality, I don’t believe that anything else can, certainly not your floundering gesture in what you call the outward direction.”

Well, this is at least some improvement, as far as Cass is concerned. Fidley may be snarling, but at least he’s addressing him directly, and he’s actually turned toward him, the two hard pebbles locking onto Cass’s gaze.

“As far as I can make out, this sideways movement that’s supposed to give you the Golden Rule just comes down to this: seeing the meaning-lessness of your life moves you to compassion for the meaninglessness of other lives.”

He says this with a smile-his most convincing one yet-and he ends it with a brief bark of a laugh. It’s a good line, and Cass laughs, too.

“And from this you want to derive morality, Cass Seltzer? That is, to say the least, a pretty tepid system of morality you’re offering us, which, even if you could get it to make internal sense, doesn’t have much force. I don’t see it getting anyone to overcome their immoral impulses.

“As far as that argument from Plato that you are so impressed with is concerned, I can’t say that I find it convincing. There’s nothing arbitrary about God’s moral grounding. It’s rooted in God’s very character. The being of goodness lies in God. Our life has moral value, sufficient so that Cass Seltzer can pity the suffering of humans, only because we are made in the image of God. There is nothing in the nature of a human being that, in and of itself, entails worthiness. Our worthiness, if it exists at all, has to be derived from something outside us.

“And from what is it derived? From that of which we cannot think without seeing Its worthiness. Seltzer’s question-how do we know that God Himself is good?-is as misguided a question as asking what time it is right now on the sun. If you understand that what we mean by the time of day is the relation between the sun and the earth, then you’re not going to ask what time it is on the sun. And if you understand that the being of God contains the grounds of goodness in Its very essence, then you’re not going to ask whether God is good or not.

“Cass Seltzer is patently confusing how we know with what we know. People can recognize moral values independently of God, and they can use that recognition to understand that God is good. But their recognizing moral values independently of God doesn’t mean that moral values themselves exist independently of God. There’s knowledge that’s independent, and then there’s existence that’s independent, and these are two different things.

“My belief is that God, who is the foundation of moral values, implants intuitions of these values in each of us. This is what the Bible happens to say, and as Cass Seltzer of all people should know, this is what many psychologists are now reporting, that, beneath the surface differences in our moral points of view, there are deep universals. So it can seem to people like Cass Seltzer that, just because his knowledge of these values can be attained independently of his knowledge of God, the values themselves are independent of God. In fact, there can be no morality independent of God, but that doesn’t mean that morality is arbitrary. Morality could not be different, because God is God; He has to be the way He is, and could not be some other way if He is God at all.”

Cass has been brought to the point of wondering how sincere Felix Fidley really is. Does he believe what he’s saying, or is he trying, as Lucinda predicted, to overwhelm him? His argument has all the structure and verbiage and feel of a philosophical argument, with its familiar distinction between how something is and how we know that something is, but it doesn’t really apply to the issue they’re debating. The philosophical distinctions glance off the surface without digging in. Even Fidley hadn’t sounded completely convinced as he delivered his last few lines, as if he had to get them out but didn’t like the taste of them in his mouth. Perhaps Cass will find a way to frame his last question that will expose Fidley’s unease with his own sophistry.

But at this point Chaplain Lenny steps in and says that this has been so fascinating, and the time has flown by so quickly, that there’s only time for one more question, which he guesses will go to Professor Fidley. Fidley again takes several moments to scan the audience.

“It seems apparent to me, and I certainly hope to many of you who are here tonight, that the Judeo-Christian system of morality, founded on the appeal to an authority beyond us, is the only thing that can confer the sort of worth on each individual that wrings tears from an atheist like Cass Seltzer. Nothing else can do it. No ‘is’ statement can entail an ‘ought’ statement. No statement about what people are like, what matters to them, entails that we ought to do unto others as we would wish them to do unto us. If we just stay on the horizontal level of ‘is’ statements, then we can’t possibly get out any ’ought’s. This is why we have to move to a whole other level, which is the level of God, the level on which the distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ disappears, a point which neither Plato nor Cass Seltzer appreciates. Plato’s excuse is that he lived before the great monotheistic discovery had spread to Greece. What’s Cass Seltzer’s excuse?

“But even if I were to grant Cass Seltzer his tepid sideways moral system, what motivation can he drum up to get anybody to do the moral thing? What motivational force can he put behind it? That’s yet another crucial problem with a secular system of morality. It has no muscle. It’s a legal system with no means of enforcement, no police to arrest people who break the law-in other words, anarchy. In the end, given a secular morality-if such a thing is even coherent-what you get is a system that is utterly toothless, so the result is the same as if there were no moral system at all: anarchy, anomie, a society consisting of people doggedly acting only in their own self-interest, in fact little more than brutes.

“But a moral system based on the will of God has enforcement built into it. What motivation do people have for doing the morally right thing? If they don’t, they will be displeasing God, and there will be, as we say, hell to pay.