God, Goodness and Philosophy

Harriet A. Harris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317126485
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Religion

Does belief in God yield the best understanding of value? Can we provide transcendental support for key moral concepts? Does evolutionary theory undermine or support religious moralities? Is divine forgiveness unjust? Can a wholly good God understand evil? Should philosophy of religion proceed in a faith-neutral way? Public and academic concerns regarding religion and morality are proliferating as people wonder about the possibility of moral reassurance, and the ability of religion to provide it, and about the future of religion and the relation between religious faiths. This book addresses current thinking on such matters, with particular focus on the relationship between moral values and doctrines of the divine. Leading scholars in the field test the scope of philosophy of religion, and engage with the possibilities and difficulties of attempting trans-faith philosophy. Chapters also relate to a number of cross-disciplinary contemporary debates: on evolution and ethics; politics, justice and forgiveness; and the relation between reason and emotions. Another set of chapters tests the coherence of Anselmian theism and concepts of an Omni-God in relation to divine knowledge and goodness. This book will be of interest to scholars and undergraduates in philosophy of religion, as well as moral philosophers, philosophers of science, theologians, and those working in theology and science.

PART I
Goodness, Morality and TranscendenceDivine Commands and the Source of Goodness

Chapter 2
The Source of Goodness

John Cottingham

Fire and the Sun

Let me begin with a fable. (I claim no great originality for it, since there is a long tradition going back to Plato, which explains the idea of a source of goodness by using the symbol of the sun.) Suppose there is a planet – let us call it Oceana – which is surrounded by an impenetrable luminous watery mist. The inhabitants believe, arguably with good reason (since there is no evidence of anything other), that they inhabit a ‘closed’ cosmos: that their world, and its surrounding atmosphere, is the universe, comprising everything that exists. Their world is a watery world – they live, reproduce and move around in a marine-style environment. In addition to the faint luminosity which enables them to find their way around, their world contains fires – strange burning islands of what we would call wood, which float around on the ocean, giving out light and heat. The expert scientists of Oceana have mapped out with great mathematical precision and accuracy the laws which govern all the watery phenomena of their ocean and their atmosphere. But the workings of the ‘fires’ do not seem to be derivable from, or explicable in terms of, any of the natural watery phenomena that their science has so successfully investigated.

Some of their philosophers, the aqualists, propose that, despite appearances, the ‘fires’ must after all be reducible to some kind of watery interactions and that it is just a matter of time until they are explained in terms of standard aquatic science. Others (highly respected for their philosophical profundity) say that fire is a sui generis, irreducibly non-aquatic property. But (though the jury is out) neither aqualism nor non-aqualism has so far completely carried the day. There is, however, a third group, the super-aqualists, who maintain that the fiery phenomena derive ultimately from a super-fiery transcendent source, a source that is wholly other than the universe comprising Oceana and its atmosphere. They identify this source with Sol, a traditional object of worship since time immemorial, which is supposed to be the source not just of fieriness but of everything that exists.

There are, of course, many objections to the Sol theory from the aqualists and even from the non-aqualists. If Sol, supremely warm and fiery, is the source of everything, how come there are parts of the planet that are cold and dark? This is known as the Problem of Darkness. But quite apart from such general objections, a further, more specific criticism of invoking Sol as the source of fieriness is commonly put forward, namely that it fails as an explanation. For if we are puzzled by the existence of fieriness in the ordinary world (so runs the objection), it surely does nothing to assuage our puzzlement to be told that it derives from something, beyond the world, that is itself fiery – precisely the property we sought to explain in the first place.

I will pause with the science fiction before it becomes too laboured; however, the cluster of Euthyphro-type problems associated with theistic accounts of goodness will already have begun to be visible in the guise of our fable if we substitute goodness for fieriness. The dilemma posed in Plato’s Euthyphro was (in updated and simplified form): is something good because God ordains it or does God ordain it because it is good? I will here assume (what I take to be pretty clear) that the first horn of the dilemma is a very unpromising one for the theist to take: even God cannot arbitrarily make something good just by ordaining it (if He could, then wanton cruelty would become good if so ordained, which is absurd). In any case, most theists will want to say that God would never issue such repugnant commands: because He is essentially good, He would only ordain good things. This suggests we should take the second horn of the dilemma – that things are ordained by God because they are already, as it were, good. But then we face, in effect, a vicious regress. Very crudely, we wanted to be given some account of this mysterious property called goodness which things have; we are then told it derives from God, who is Himself good, and from His ordaining things because they are themselves good. But that does not appear to get us any further from an explanatory point of view. The explanandum, the self-same phenomenon of goodness that we were seeking to explain, is re-imported and served up again: it pops up in the explanans and we are no further forward.

I hope the parallel in our fable is reasonably clear. Fieriness, which was our explanandum phenomenon, reappears as a property of Sol, the very entity that was invoked to provide an explanation for fieriness in the first place. The threat of a regress of this kind has a long history. In the Parmenides, Plato famously canvasses an objection to his theory of Forms which has subsequently become known as the ‘Third Man’ argument: if what makes something F is participation in the Form of F, and every Form of F is itself F, then we have an explanatory regress: we still have not really explained what makes the Form itself count as F, unless we posit a further, ‘third’ entity, in which the previously posited Form and its instances all partake – and so on ad infinitum.1 For our purposes in this chapter, for F-ness read goodness. If we block the regress by saying that the Form of the Good, or God, is just good in virtue of its nature or in a way that requires no further explanation, then it is not clear that our initial puzzlement about what makes for goodness has really been assuaged.

Are regresses always vicious? No. If I want to know how or why my house and my neighbour’s house are on fire, then it will, in one way, be a perfectly good explanation to say that they were struck by a fiery meteorite from above. I have explained a given object’s possession of a particular property by invoking its ‘participation’ in a property coming from outside, or by the property having been transmitted from a supra-terrestrial body which itself possesses the relevant property of fieriness. As far as explaining the particular phenomenon I started with is concerned, this is fine. But if I want to explain how fieriness in general comes about, or what fieriness consists in, invoking a further fiery object, however exalted, does not seem to do any useful work.

For all the reasons just given, it seems that the scientists of Oceana are perfectly justified in being impatient with those who invoke the supposed fiery body Sol as a putative explanation of fieriness. And if we cash out the fable and apply it to theism and to the invocation of God as the source of goodness, then it seems that those who object that this explains nothing about the nature of goodness are in one way perfectly correct. Indeed, I am inclined to think (though I cannot argue this out here) that the same applies to any attempt to explain problematic features of reality by invoking a transcendent source which is itself supposed to incorporate the relevant features. In my view (as I have argued elsewhere), God is not, and cannot be invoked as, an explanation in anything like the way in which explanations are understood in a scientific context. For God’s transcendence means that he is wholly outside the normal chain of events and causes. As Anthony Kenny has aptly put it: ‘God is not a part of any of the explanatory series which he is invoked to account for.’2

Yet for all that, and notwithstanding these difficulties, it seems to me that we can perhaps glimpse (at least by analogy) how a transcendent God might be responsible for our world, or even certain aspects of it. Let us go back to the world of Oceana. With respect to this world, we who have created or imagined the story have, so to speak, a window on the transcendent. We are in the fortunate position of being outside the limiting framework within which the unfortunate scientists of that planet had to operate, given their impermeable atmosphere. From the point of view of our privileged perspective, we can see that their world is not a closed cosmos and that the luminosity of their atmosphere does in fact derive from its being exposed to the light of a star, to something in some ways similar to what the super-aqualists imagined as the transcendent deity Sol (though of course this is only an analogy, since, for us, stars and suns are not transcendent items but part of our natural universe). Again from our privileged perspective, we can also see that their positing of Sol as the source of the fieriness of their islands was in a certain sense correct. It is not that their sun somehow transmitted fieriness to the floating wooden islands either causally or in virtue of some mysterious fiat; nor indeed is it true that Sol is itself fiery in anything like the same sense as the flaming wooden islands (the working of a solar nuclear furnace being radically different from the combustion of wood). Instead, the sun (as we privileged observers know) is the source of fieriness in a quite different sense, which the isolated scientists and philosophers of Oceana could not possibly conceive of: it is the source of that energy without which their planet could have contained no life, no plants, no photosynthesis and therefore no trees or bushes of any kind able to store the energy later released on the burning wooden islands. The mysterious phenomenon of the combustion of wood, wholly outside the scope of any of their laws for aquatic phenomena (accurate and complete though these laws were, as far as they went) – this mysterious and apparently anomalous phenomenon, the manifestation of energy accompanied by heat and flame, was indeed (as we privileged external observers can see) made possible by virtue of a vast and to them inconceivable extra-planetary source of energy. A supreme fire – fiery, albeit only by analogy with the ordinary fires they observed – was indeed the ultimate source.

Could God be the source of goodness in our own world in something like that way? I will not claim that our fable has made such a view more plausible. However, I think it does suggest that the possibility cannot be dismissed out of hand – unless, of course, we are prepared to follow the dogmatic naturalist metaphysicians of Oceana and insist that the cosmos we inhabit must be a closed cosmos, that the total set of objects and events occurring since the Big Bang comprises all the reality that there is.

God as Source

Having completed this (perhaps rather protracted) preliminary softening-up process, let me turn directly to theistic accounts of goodness. God, the God who is the object of worship in the Judaeo-Christian and Islamic traditions, is conceived of as the source of truth, beauty and goodness. He is, as the Epistle of James puts it, the giver of ‘every good and every perfect gift’; in the words of the seventeenth-century Cambridge philosopher Peter Sterry, the ‘stream of the divine love’ is the source of ‘all truths, goodness, joys, beauties and blessedness’.3 For the worshipper, involved in the praxis of daily or weekly liturgy, this idea is pretty much central, the basis of the sense of joy and exaltation experienced as one turns to God in praise and thanksgiving.

But once we are out of the church (synagogue or mosque) and back in the study, particularly in the cold and unforgiving light of the analytic philosopher’s study, questions arise as to what exactly it can mean to say that God is the source of truth, beauty and goodness. Well, I suppose one of the most important things it implies, to begin with, is a firm denial of relativism. If an eternal, necessary being, existing independently of us, is the source of truth, then this rules out pragmatic and relativistic conceptions according to which truth is simply what works for us or what is currently accepted in our culture circle. And, similarly, beauty, if stemming from God, cannot not simply be ‘in the eye of the beholder’ – just a function of the subjective tastes of various human beings. Moreover, goodness, and value generally, cannot be dependent merely on our personal or societal preferences, let alone something we can create or invent by our own magnificent acts of will, as Friedrich Nietzsche maintained.4 All these things, truth, beauty and goodness, must, on the contrary, be objectively based.

In addition to underwriting objectivity and non-relativity, the idea of a divine source for truth, beauty and goodness also implies a certain kind of authority. This seems to connect with the notion (by no means confined to theists) that truth, beauty and goodness exert some kind of normative pull on us. Truth is to be believed; beauty is to be admired; and goodness is to be pursued. These imperatives ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• PROLEGOMENA
• PART I GOODNESS, MORALITY AND TRANSCENDENCE
• PART II EVIL AND THE GOODNESS OF GOD
• Afterword: The Continuing Debate on Morality and God
• References
• Index