The Fall and free will

As I was thinking about the question of the atonement from my previous post, I realized there is a contradiction between the concept of The Fall and a common explanation for evil.  I have never seen this problem addressed before in any way.  Maybe I’m missing something or it has been addressed before.  If so, I’d like to know.

The problem of evil is how there can be evil in a world if God is all powerful and all good. One common answer to this is the argument from free will: God allows evil in the world, because only if there is evil can there be free will. We must be free to choose good or bad.  This argument assumes that free will is one of the greatest goods, so God allows evil in order to allow the greater good of free will.

First, I would like to point out this means that there must be a good that exists independent of God.  If good is simply whatever God says it is or wants it to be, he would not be constrained by greater or lesser goods.  he could simply declare that free will is not a great good, and create a world without evil.  The only way it makes sense for him to create a world with free will is if there was some criteria outside of God that could determine this world is better.  All arguments for evil actually require that God weighs pros and cons, rather than just declare whatever he wants to be good or evil.  Therefore, we can have good without God.

But the interesting point is what this says about the Fall of Adam and Eve.  According to the free will argument, a world with evil is actually better than a world without evil.  A world without any evil would not have any free will.  God created this world with evil because it is better.  Yet the Christian view is that before the fall, there was an idyllic Eden without evil.  The sin of Adam and Eve is often represented as introducing free will.  That makes sense if free will is impossible without evil.  Therefore, the fall was good.  Original sin is good.  The world before the fall, without evil, was worse than the world we have now.  If that is not true, then you loose the argument for evil.  God could create a world like Eden, but he doesn’t, so he is not all good.   How can people say that evil is acceptable because it gives us free will and yet simultaneously hold that the world before the fall was better than the world after the fall?

Selfishness in world religions

In Woody Allen’s film Crimes and Misdemeanors, the protagonist kills another character.  At first he is troubled and he fears he will get caught, but eventually it becomes clear that there will be no price to pay.  He will not get caught, he benefits personally from it, and he does not feel guilt.  When the situation is presented in a hypothetical form to another character, played by Woody Allen, he insists that there would be some kind of retribution eventually.  But the movie implies is just wishful thinking and that does not happen.

Are there acts like that, selfish acts that benefit an individual, harm another, and have no consequences?  I have just become familiar with the work of Neusner, Chilton, Green and Green in Altruism in World Religions on the concepts of selfishness and altruism in the major religions.  It is very relevant to one of my recent posts.  Neusner et al. surveyed major leaders and experts in all of the major religions of the world to see how they understood selfishness and altruism.  They surveyed many forms of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Budhism, etc.  They found that all religions use the words in the same way.  All of them deny the existence of selfishness and altruism in the most common sense.

Saying someone is selfish can mean different things.  It always means some form of looking out for your own interests.  It can mean looking out for your own interests in the short term at the expense of others, but the action is harmful to yourself in the long term.  It can be beneficial financially but harmful psychologically.  There are other variations.  The most straightforward meaning is that something is selfish if it benefits the self at the expense of others.  These benefits are long term and include all possible kinds of benefits.  Likewise, altruism is benefiting others at the expense of self.

No religion recognizes the existence of either of these phenomena.  How could that be?  They all teach that actions that appear selfish are ultimately harmful to the actor.  Often the harm is more long term and it is pschological or social.  Sometimes it is in the next life.  But they all teach there are no truly selfish actions.  People will not have true lasting benefits from short term selfish acts.  They always pay.  In the same way, there are no truly altruistic acts.  If a person sacrifices him or herself, she will be rewarded, eventually.  Again, it might only be in the long term, including the next life.  It might be psychological or reputation or similar rewards, but ultimately, we benefit by doing good.

In my earlier post, I claimed that religious ethics is basically based on self interest, just like secular ethics.  This study proves it.  Sometimes believers ask non believers to explain why people would do something altruistic without a God, yet even in their own religions, there are no truly altruistic acts.

Most of the reasoning used by religions are correct, and they work just as well without God.  It is true that often a selfish act comes back to haunt an individual.  They will feel guilt, they will be punished by others, they will lose their reputation.  Altruistic acts make a person feel good.  If you give some money to charity, you benefit by feeling better, and perhaps by having a better society in which to live.  Most religions actually focus on the benefits in this life.  They are wise to realize that actions that might seem beneficial in the short term are harmful in the long term.

Some religions do have something stonger to offer, for those who get away.  By having an after life or reincarnation, they can have more reliable rewards or punishments, and by having God they have a more reliable enforcer.  But people are still acting out of an self interest.  Christianity relies some on eternal rewards, but eternal life is usually based more on faith than deeds, so it mostly relies on things in this life.  The religion that brings in the supernatural to the greatest degree is Hinduism with the concept of Karma, a careful score keeping of all good and bad acts.

Evolutionary biology has come up with the same explanation for apparently altruistic acts.  It is in the selfish best interest of the individual, or at least its genes, to cooperate and be nice, sometimes.  Just as with religions, evolutionary biology does not account for truly altruistic acts, only those that seem to be altruistic.  Unlike religions, it does recognize truly selfish acts.  There are cheaters that benefit with no price to pay, under some circumstances.  Evolution explains cooperating behaviors in everything from microbes to humans, and it can account for why we have feelings of guilt or shame and why it feels good to give to charity.

So do truly selfish or altruistic acts really exist, contrary to religions?  Are there examples like in Crimes and Misdemeanors?  I think there are.  Although very often selfish acts are punished or have harmful consequences, sometimes they don’t.  The unfortunate truth is that occasionally people escape, although it isn’t often.  Usually there are consequences.  This is common enough that you can come up with your own example of someone who benefited on the backs of others.  Our laws help to get some of those who escape the psychological and social sanctions, but they aren’t as efficient at getting cheaters as God.  Maybe one reason people prefer to believe in God is so that they can feel better about such cheaters.  Religion and humanism have a similar ethic, but with God, they have 100% enforcement.

Evolution says there should be no truly altruistic acts, at least no altruistic behavior that is directly selected.  Acts that seem altruistic are actually selfish, just like with religions.  But that qualifier is important.  Not all behaviors are directly selected, and it might be that a general behavioral rule is selected that in some circumstances is truly altruistic, or a behavior is an indirect effect of selection on something else, or a behavior acts differntly under different environments.

Contrary to religions, I think there are truly altruistic acts, even if they are fairly rare.  Usually when we help others, we also get some kind of benefit, even if it is just the respect of those we help.  But sometimes a person is asked sacrifice their own happiness to help someone else achieve happiness under circumstances that it is very unlikely they will ever get a reward for their action or even be recognized.   People do it, and we are often inspired by such stories in the grand sweep of history, but it can also happen in just the every day world of life and love.  Neither evolution nor religion accounts for such acts.  Nevertheless, we can be glad they exist when we are the beneficiaries.

Could God do something that is not good?

I will now post the last part of my discussion of ethics in a godless world.  I have put this part off because it is quite unoriginal.  The criticism goes back to Plato.  I will do my best to present it.  The easiest way to bring up this point is to ask if there is anything that God can do that is not good, or holy.  If God commands genocide (which he does in the Bible), is it good?

If the answer is that there are some things that God could do but are not good, then that means the criteria for good and evil is external to God.  If genocide is wrong even if God commands it, then right and wrong must be things that God must follow.  He is constrained by something external that we call good, and God is all good because he perfectly matches this thing we call good.  In that case, we don’t need the middle man (God).  Good exists without god, he is not the author of good.

On the other hand, if whatever God does or says is good by definition, then good is completely arbitrary.  If someone claims that God ordered them to kill their children, how could you argue against it?  God could change what is good, which seemed to happen, since some things that were law in the old testament are not law in the new testament.  The only reason we have to follow God is because he is powerful.  God might not have our best interests at heart, his rules might go contrary to nature, he could be a megalomaniac.  There is no reason to call it good, other than God said so, so you better listen.

Some people might say that although what God says is good, God’s nature is such that he would only wish what is good for us and wouldn’t order terrible things.  Notice the use of the word “good”.  What is good for us.  In order to say that God wouldn’t do something evil or bad for humans, you again need to have some external definition of what is good, some rules that we know God would not break.  You could say that God created us, so he knows what is good for us, or created our nature such that what he says is good, but again you have the same problem.

omeone might claim that good exists external to God and isn’t arbitrary, but only revelation can show us what that good is.  This then requires using the Bible as the sole source of ethics.  We have seen that is not the case.  People don’t say we shouldn’t lie just because the Bible says so.  We use reason, which presumably can be used to determine what good is, without the middle man of God.

So at first it seems that God gives us some way to ground ethics.  It seems that it removes the subjectivity.  But as I have shown in this and other posts, the criticisms that believers love to level at atheism can also be leveled against God.  We still must ground ethics in our self interest, or it still could become purely arbitrary.  At best, God becomes superfluous.  In this case, either ethics are purely arbitrary, or they exist without God.

I still don’t get the moral logic of the redemption

I was going to respond to the comments in my last post in the comments section, but since it will be long, it makes sense to answer them in a fresh post.  You can look at those comments first.

None of the commenters explain why the choice of Adam and Eve is inherited.  Why couldn’t God let each individual choose?  Maybe Abel wouldn’t have screwed up, why is he damned for what dad did?  Couldn’t God offer the tree to him as well?  God apparently changed human nature because of the act of these two.  The closest to an answer to this is that the act somehow cracked the mold of humanity or a spiritual law caused it to happen.  Still, it is necessary that God created that spiritual law or created the world such that a choice of two people would rend the mold.  God could have just condemned Adam and Eve and given their children another chance.

Joanna Mallory speaks entirely in terms of an individual wronging God in the present tense (if I choose to be boss of my life, etc.).  I can understand that.  But there is no explanation of why Adam wronging God should affect me.  How is a God that creates all of the suffering in the world because of one act at all just or merciful?

All commenters made some equation between original sin and free will.  Of course, Adam and Eve had free will before their sin as well, or they couldn’t have chosen as they did.  So their act didn’t create free will.  You can use orginal sin just as a metaphor for the fact that humans are free and we often choose to hurt people.  I don’t see that as at all useful.  We already know that, and it is an unsatisfying “just so” story for its origin.  The part about things being perfect prior to the sin is the part that is hard to believe.  All explanations for human origins, scientific or mythic, explain the fact that we make bad choices.  If original sin is just a metaphor for the fact that we are selfish, then tying it to a specific act is pointless.  It makes it worse, because now it is something that could be different, but God imposed it on us because he was pissed at Eve.

I know that the fruit in Genesis 3 is not specified as an apple, nor is the tempter actually called a snake.  But it doesn’t matter what the act is, whether it is eating bad fruit or strange sex acts involving serpents.  Why change the world because of it?

And none of the commenters explain the necessity of sending Jesus.  First, I don’t see how that it really changed anything.  When we are “saved” by Jesus, we are just as selfish and sinful.  Nothing changed in human nature with the coming of Jesus, and believers are no less selfish than others.  If sending God was supposed to save us from original sin, why all of this talk about us still being sinful?  If believing in Jesus made us less sinful you might have a case, but clearly Christians are just as prone to sin as anyone else.

But more importantly, there was really no attempt to explain why killing his son is the way to get rid of original sin.  There is talk about having someone perfect to take on the sins.  How does Jesus dying help at all?

Laurie says that if she wanted to pay for my sin, she would have to be perfect first.  I don’t understand.  In what way could she possibly pay for my sin, perfect or not?  If I hurt someone, only I can pay for my sin, and forgiveness can only come from the person I wronged.  How could any third party pay for it?  She can offer to die for what I did wrong, but it would be a wasted gesture.

If I wrong someone, then I can be redeemed by that person forgiving me.  It must be a free choice between him and me.  If my grandpa wronged someone, it doesn’t make any sense for that person to forgive me.  They have to forgive my grandpa.  And whether it is me or my grandparents, it doesn’t make any sense for that person to say they will forgive me, but only if I kill his son.

If someone is a killer and is condemned to die, would justice be served if someone came in and said I will die in his place?  That’s what Jesus did, he offered to die in our place, even though we are the criminals.  This is an innocent person, being killed for someone else’s crimes.  How does that make sense?  How does that fix the crime?  Would the victims of the crime somehow feel better by having an innocent person killed?

If the victim of our crime is God himself, then what strange terms are these for his forgiveness?  Does it matter if the person making the offer is perfect or not?  And if God demands this, why?  God could forgive the criminal directly, or he could demand an act of kindness towards those he wronged.  Why would God say that I will forgive you, but only if this person is killed instead?

Steve Grove talks a lot about holiness and grace, but those aren’t addressing my question.  When he does address my question, this is the core of his answer: “So, the death of the perfect man is what broke the curse of sin – death.”  There is no explanation for why this would break that curse.  God could have chosen any means to break the curse.  Why a scapegoat?  It lacks any moral logic.  Presumably it is God who sets the criteria for how to break his curse.  The curse was originally put on us for a disobedient or selfish choice.  Wouldn’t it make more sense then to let humanity prove we can make the right choice?

It just seems like God making strange arbitrary rules.  His rule is that if Adam and Eve make the wrong choice, everyone pays for it.  This is a rule created by God, not imposed on him.  He then sat down and tried to figure out how to fix this mess, and decided that he would send his son, his son would collect the sins, and then by killing him, the sins are gone.  That’s the way we can fix our mistake, and he’s sticking with it.  He briefly thought about the option of sending his son as a downtrodden man and seeing if humans would lend a hand, but that would be too obvious.  The best people can say is this is the way God said would redemption would happen, so that’s it.  There is simply an appeal to authority, but no attempt is made to explain the moral logic.

Can someone explain the redemption?

I honestly don’t understand the central idea of Christianity, and if there is anyone out there who can explain it to me, I would appreciate it.  I am talking about the incarnation and redemption.  About Jesus dying for our sins.  Even when I was a believer, I mostly just believed in God and didn’t worry too much about specific doctrines.  When I did believe, I was OK with just this general idea that Jesus died for us, but I didn’t think too much about the logic of it.  I assume at least some believers have thought about the details and it makes sense to them.  Can you explain it to me?

My basic understanding is that Jesus death was necessary to save us from original sin.  Original sin is a problem in the first place, of course.  Why should all of humanity be condemned forever due to the choice of two people?  I usually thought of original sin as more of a metaphor for our imperfect selfish nature, and in that way it’s less of a problem.  But ultimately, it is God damning us.  It is something he imposed.  Presumably, he could lift his own curse at any time for any reason.  What he goes with, in order to escape the death of original sin, is that we murder his son.

I don’t get it.  Why couldn’t he just remove his own curse without the theatrics?  Or if we have to prove we are worthy, how about sending his son and if we treat him nice, then save us?  I still have the problem of cursing and damning being inherited–all of Adam and Eve’s descendants are damned because of their choice, and all of us today are saved by the choices of people 2000 years ago.  If Jesus hadn’t been killed and we had been nice to him, would salvation be impossible?  His crucifixion seems to be prophesied and preordained, so God knew it would happen anyway.  Is there a reason to go through with it?  If he just wanted us to believe in Jesus, why couldn’t we just believe in a preacher and healer?

Why is it that eating an apple gets us damned but murdering God saves us?  What’s wrong with these priorities?  I know eating the apple was disobeying God, but it still seems odd.

How is it that Jesus death saves us?  God could choose whatever he wanted to save us.  Why is his suffering significant?  Of course, we have the problem that people like Pilate and Judas are condemned for doing what was necessary for everyone’s salvation.  Did God need to suffer to have the sympathy necessary to forgive?  An all knowing God must already know about suffering.  It’s not like he learned something from his time on earth.

The salvation story does make sense to me if you understand a common view at the time, the idea of the scapegoat.  A scapegoat originally wasn’t just a figure of speech.  The Hebrews would symbollically put the sins of the people on the goat and send it out into the wilderness, thus symbollically removing the sins from the people.  The similarities to Jesus are obvious.  But of course, a goat cannot actually take sins with it.  At best it is a symbol.  How does Jesus actually remove our sins by his death?  Why should what happened 2000 years ago have any affect on my sins?  Why couldn’t God remove those sins without all of the bloodshed?  It seems to me that the idea of the redemption made sense with a superstitious or simple view of God, but it is nonsense with a view of an all powerful God.

It seems that the redemption is one of those things that makes sense to a lot of people simply because they grew up with it and heard it repeated over and over, but is absurd when you look at it from outside.  If I understood it, that wouldn’t make me believe it.  But it would be nice to at least understand what it is that I don’t believe.

Smuggling in ethics

I have been writing about ethics without God.  I should say that the problem of ethics was the last thing that kept my belief in God.  I was convinced by the argument from C S Lewis about morality.  It was apparent all humans had a very deep sense of morality.  This was universal, not cultural.  It seemed that moral sense was tapping into something outside of us and must have been given by God.  Now I’m not sure why I didn’t consider an evolutionary explanation for that sense, but I didn’t.  We understand quite a bit about how a moral sense can evolve now.  Also, it seemed that without God, ethics were relative and had no solid basis.

In my earlier posts I showed some of the problems with my former view.  God doesn’t really solve the problem of what compels us to be moral.  An enlightened self interest is better than God, and ultimately, God still requires self interest to compel compliance.

When I still believed, I knew that non believers can be ethical, but I thought it was likely that those ethics were smuggled in.  We grow up being taught what is right and wrong.  Those ethics originally had a basis in religion.  Later, we reject the religion, but still accept the ethics we were taught, even though the basis for them is gone.  Eventually, if everyone did that, the ethics would crumble because there is no longer a foundation for them.

I thought that because I had a hard time figuring out how ethics could not degenerate into complete relativity, and I knew that such subjective ethics were dangerous and couldn’t hold up.  Even after I rejected God completely, I still wasn’t quite sure how to ground ethics, but I had at least some idea.

An important insight was realizing that religion smuggles in secular ethics as often or more often than the other way around.  For most of our behavior, we give reasons why something is right or wrong.  When asked why lying is wrong, even believers don’t say it’s just because the Bible says so.  They would say, what if everyone lied, or explain how it hurts people, things like that.  They use purely secular, non religious reasoning.  More impotantly, some religious views have changed, and they have changed not because of revelation or anything related to God, but because of reason.

Slavery is a good example.  The obvious reading of the Bible is that it condones slavery.  It has various rules about how to treat slaves, which certainly implies an endorsement of slavery.  There were no church teaching against slavery for 1500 years.  It was during the enlightenment, when the use of reason lead to concepts of universal rights, that slavery was condemned.  Anti slavery views were often taken up very strongly by the religious, and they felt that it was God’s will and they  might find some Biblical passage to justify it after the fact, but in reality, their newfound belief was smuggled in from secular reasoning.

If we can use reason to justify most of the traditional teachings in the Bible, and if many religious teachings have changed due to reason, what is the need for religion in ethics?  The only thing left purely to religion are rather silly things like whether we should eat pork, and some strictures on purely personal behavior (such as masturbation, etc.).  Strongly secular societies, such as Europe, have not seen a decrease in morality, at least not public morality.  They do better than the U.S. in most measures.  The only thing affected by the loss of religion is private morality and religious observance.

This doesn’t completely get rid of the problem of relativity in ethics.  We are still left with a situation where ethical views change over time.  But it seems that morality has mostly gotten better.  The religious often think we are in moral decay, but I don’t see going back to a time with slavery, racism, oppression, child labor, and women as chattel can be seen as an improvement.  We can take the lesson of science when it comes to ethics.  Science doesn’t know the truth.  It just gets better and better at approaching the truth.  Science has been called knowledge without certainty.  Ethics can be like that as well.  We don’t know for sure what is right or wrong.  We can just approach it.  Just as our science gets better over time, so our ethics gets better over time as we better understand what does and does not lead to human happiness.  If you want absolute unchanging certainty, I guess you need God.  You don’t have to think quite as much that way either.  I prefer the other way.

Can mountain lions get a divorce?

I would like to add to my discussion on how ethics derives from human  nature by using a simple thought experiment.  We can ask how ethics would change if human nature was different, or how ethics would differ for another species or for aliens.  Much of our ethical code deals with how we interact in a society and the structure of the family.  We are a gregarious species with a long childhood.  But let’s say we were a solitary creature, like a mountain lion, that briefly mates and then separates.  How would mountain lion ethics be different?  There would probably be a lot of ethical rules about staying in your own territory and leaving others alone, and there wouldn’t be a lot on obligations to a mate.

We are a species that takes decades to raise our young, and many moral pronouncements follow from that.  We need a long term stable male-female bond to raise children.  If it only took one year to raise children, would there be such strong rules about marriage and divorce and fidelity?  If we laid eggs and left them to their own devices, certainly familial obligations would be drastically different.  Some species are naturally polygamous.  If we were a species like wolves with an alpha male that mates and others that don’t, would our rules about marriage be the same?  If we were a hive society like  ants and bees, wouldn’t our ethics be drastically different?  Perhaps having private property would be seen as sinful.  Sacrifice for the good of the hive would be seen as the highest good.

While many rules will apply to all humans, there could also be differences between societies that could affect what is right and wrong.  Some ethical rules might be true across societies, but some will be relative to the society.

So ethics aren’t necessarily subjective.  They can be derived from a knowledge of human nature.  But they aren’t absolute either.  If you claim that ethics comes from God, what does that mean?  Could God arbitrarily demand the same sexual mores of species that raise children long term, or lay eggs, or have a single queen or have a dominant male?  How could such a one size fits all rule be seen as good in each of these societies?  Clearly, if God makes the rules, he must take the nature of his creatures into account, and what is good cannot be the same for all possible species on all planets.  So why do we need God to determine what is right?  Why can’t we get rid of the middle man, look at human nature, and figure out what is right and wrong from that?  That’s the way God does it.

Can we be moral without God?

Many believers claim that you cannot have morality without God.  I actually agree that there is no ultimate grounding of ethics without God, but where I differ is in the belief that God helps at all.

I will start with a simple example, the well-known tragedy of the commons.  Fisheries have an unfortunate tendency to over fish.  It is in the interest of each fisherman to  maximize his yield, so they harvest as much as they can.  Since everyone does this, the fish decline and soon there are no more fish.  It is in the long term interest of the fishermen to limit their yeild so that the fish can last.  But that is only useful if everyone else also limits their catch.  So we can say that a rational rule is for each fisherman to take only a limited harvest.  But the problem is, why should an individual fisherman comply?  If everyone else is limiting their yeild, then he can take more, get rich, and still have fish left over because of the kindness of the others.  If everyone thinks this, we are back where we started.  That often happens, which is why fish are being depleted.

The point is that you can have an ethical principle that makes sense to follow if everyone follows it.  But looking just at your self interest, there is no reason for an individual to follow it.  There is no reason not to cheat.  If the rules are enforced by a government and a punishment will follow, then there is a good reason to comply.  In this case, the reason to comply is still self interest–the desire not to be punished.

This also applies to more general moral principles.  Let’s say we use Utilitarianism, doing the most good for the most people.  Let’s say we are able to accurately determine which action will do that.  Still, the question for an individual is “why shouldn’t I do what is good for me, even if it does produce less good for others?”  The same is true for any other moral principle, such as the golden rule.  A person can still ask what binds them to this rule?  Why not just pursue your own self interest?

I would say that one reason to follow the golden rule is because it is in our best interest.  If we follow it, others will treat us that way in turn, and we will be happier.  Many moral behaviors follow from human nature.  In the end, most people are happier if we give to others rather than take, if we are honest rather than lie, etc. We are social creatures, we need love, we need the good will of our fellows to succeed.  It’s part of who we are and how others respond to us.  So it is in our own self interest to behave morally.

We still have the problem of cheaters.  Regardless of what I said above, at least some people can be happy by lying and taking advantage of others.  Let everyone else follow the golden rule, and you get all of the benefits.  If a person takes advantage of other people’s good nature, they can do quite well for themselves, in the same way that a cheating fisherman can take advantage of the good will of other fisherman.  Morality appears to be subjective and there is no ultimate answer to why we should behave morally.  If we say that we should behave morally to maximize our happiness, yet others are able to be happy without behaving that way, how can we say they are wrong?

Here is where God seems to be able to help.  In response to the question “why should I personally follow this particular rule, which is good for the group but not necessarily for me”, the theist can say that the reason to behave morally is because of God.

At first this seems to solve the problem because it has taken the source of ethics outside of ourselves.  We now have an objective basis for morality, no longer dependent on human whims.  But it really hasn’t solved the problem.  A person can still ask “why should I care what God says.  I will be happier if I behave different than what he says”.  To this, most theists can respond that if you do not follow the rules, you will not go to heaven, or will go to hell (although this is far from universal among religions).  So in other words, it is just like the fisherman being punished.  The reason to comply is still self interest.  Morality is not based on something outside of myself, but because it is in my own self interest, in the long run, to behave this way.  I don’t want to go to hell, so I should follow the rules.  All that religion does is makes the punishment more guaranteed and more severe, and the long run now is much longer.

Without God, we can say that we should behave morally because, when we consider human nature and society, it is in our own best interests to behave that way.  We will be happier in the long run.  If we believe in God, still the ultimate reason to behave morally is because it is in our self interest in the long run (and often that it is part of our nature).  In some ways it is worse.  Many Christian religions say salvation doesn’t depend on works, on behavior, but only on faith.  Even Hitler could have been saved, if he believed before his death.

We cannot have completely certain ethics without God.  But we can be mostly certain.  Science has been described as knowledge without certainty.  Some people dislike science because of that.  Science doesn’t give absolute answers, it just gives approximations of the truth, and some people are very uncomfortable with uncertainty.  The same is true with ethics.  We have no ultimate policeman, but we can get close to truth, and we can police ourselves.  This is not subjective ethics, it is just not absolute ethics.  Some people are also uncomfortable with this.

I still have many loose ends to tie up on this topic, but this is already too long for one post, so I will write more later.

Does God grade on a curve?

I mentioned the miserable doctrine of hell in passing in my last post.  Its vile nature has been pointed out by many before, but there was one aspect I don’t know if I’ve ever seen addressed.

The reason hell is such a repulsive doctrine is because it is eternal.  Why would any God punish people for all time?  Even on earth with our limited resources we attempt to rehabilitate criminals and like to believe anyone can change.  Not God.  Once damned, you will suffer forever with no possibility of parole.  And yet they claim this God is just and merciful.  If there is a hell, then God is neither just nor merciful.  In fact, if I discovered that there really was a God, and he really did make hell and damn people for eternity in it, I could not worship him, or even respect him.  The only possible reason to listen would be fear.

People try to minimize how damnable this doctrine is, claiming that it is our choice, etc., but none of them are able to excuse it.  There is one other aspect that I think about naturally, since I am a teacher.  Teachers must asign grades.  We have to put people in one category or another.  It’s the least pleasant part of the job.  The most difficult thing to decide is always where to draw the line.  Ultimately, you must say that this student gets an A and a student just a little bit lower gets a B, and likewise for every grade.  In a large class, the difference between the highest B and the lowest A might be very small.  The low A might be quite far away from the high A.  Yet we have to draw the line somewhere, and put each student into one category or another.

How does God do it?  There are only two grades with him, pass or fail.  But for absolutely any criteria, there will be a continuum, especially with billions of people.  How much faith did they have?  It ranges imperceptibly from complete faith to slightly weaker to faltering to no faith.  How kind were they to their fellow man?  Same thing.  Did they choose Jesus?  There are degrees of that.  Ultimately, God must make a decision.  At least with grades, the difference between a B and a C in one class isn’t the end of the world.  Even failing them doesn’t mean they don’t have a chance for happiness in other areas.  But God must separate two people that differ only a little bit in faith.  One is damned forever, one saved.  The person who was just barely saved might barely belong in the same place as those with strongest faith, but both are saved.

It does no good to say that God is omniscient.  With complete knowledge, he will just be able to see how truly continuous and contingent all traits in humans are.  There simply are no important traits that people fit in an either/or manner.  There has to be a cutoff where just one more prayer, one less lie, a smidgeon more faith, would have saved someone.  Forever.

Hell is uncomfortable enough to most people today that it is deemphasized, except in the far right Christians.  In the past, it was thought only a few were saved.  Now many believers would say only the truly wicked are damned (and some reject it entirely).  But it doesn’t matter.  There is still someone just a little less or a little more wicked, and their fate is completely different.

I think the Catholics recently did away with the idea of purgatory (or maybe it was just limbo).  I’m not sure if I understood it completely, but it at least seemed a little more humane.  I saw purgatory as a half way house, a place where those on the border could go and rehabilitate themselves, get a few prayers (or Papal indulgences, I guess) and be on their way.

Assigning a continuum of students into a few arbitrary grades is inherently unjust, but it’s the best system we have.  I hate failing students, but every now and then, I have to.  At least I know they will not be damned forever.  The doctrine of hell is inherently unjust, and no excuses can change that.

Life, the universe, and everything; part 3: the answer

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OK, with a title like that you know I had to do this, right?  With deep regards to the late brilliant Douglas Adams.