In response to my arguments for Darwinian natural right and Darwinian conservatism, the most common objection is that a morality rooted in human nature fails if it is not supported by religious belief. This is the major objection coming from religious conservatives like Carson Holloway and John West. The same objection comes from philosophical theologians like C. Stephen Evans and John Hare.
Evans and Hare are both leading proponents of the divine command theory of morality, based on the idea that ultimately the only reliable standard of morality is God's command. They criticize my evolutionary naturalism, because they believe a purely natural morality cannot work if it is not sustained by religious belief in God as the source of all moral standards. Holloway and West seem to make the same argument, although they are not quite as explicit in adopting the divine command theory.
All of these critics look to the moral debate over slavery as illustrating the failure of natural morality without religion. I argue--particularly, in my chapter on slavery in Darwinian Natural Right--that slavery manifested a conflict between the natural desire of the slaveholders to exploit their slaves and the natural desire of the slaves to resist exploitation. Slavery was wrong because it violated the natural moral principle of justice as reciprocity. The resistance of slaves was a reminder to slaveholders that their slaves were not naturally adapted to their enslavement, and that to treat them as slaves was to treat some human beings as if they were not human. But still the self-interest of slaveholders made it hard to immediately abolish slavery without great costs. And the natural tendency to tribalism made it hard for former slaveholders and former slaves to live together as equals. All of these factors--combined with the constitutional status of slavery in the United States--made the debate over slavery the deepest moral crisis in American history.
But according to my critics, such an analysis fails to explain the abolition of slavery, because it fails to see that human beings would never have recognized the immorality of slavery through their natural experience if they had not been taught that slavery was contrary to God's law. According to these critics, we know that slavery is wrong only because we know that slavery contradicts the the moral principle of universal love taught in the Bible. The teaching of Jesus that we should love our neighbors sustains a universal and disinterested love of all human beings equally, and all morality is rooted in this one divine command. The biblical teachings about the universal moral dignity of all human beings as created in God's image and about the Golden Rule as dictating that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us support this universal love teaching. Only in the light of this religious morality of the Bible could human beings finally see the immorality of slavery and then work to abolish it.
I have written about various facets of this topic many times on this blog. But recently I was reminded of it in reading the Rev. Fred A. Ross's book Slavery Ordained of God, which was first published in 1857 and reprinted this year by BiblioBazaar (Charleston, S.C.). Ross was a leading Presbyterian minister and theologian in Huntsville, Alabama, who defended Southern slavery as supported by the Bible. As Mark Noll and other scholars have noted, this was a popular position, because many Christians in the United States read the Bible as sanctioning slavery as commanded by God.
Part of the special interest that Ross's writing has is that Abraham Lincoln wrote a brief response to Ross's proslavery theology. As I noted in my recent posts on Thomas Krannawitter's new book on Lincoln, Krannawitter claims that "Lincoln proceeded to dismantle the pro-slavery theological arguments presented by Ross." But when we look at Lincoln's note on Ross, we see that Lincoln is actually evasive about the Bible on slavery: "The Almighty gives no audible answer to the question, and his revelation--the Bible--gives none--or, at most, none but such as admits of a squabble, as to its meaning." Lincoln then goes on to suggest that "Dr. Ross" is probably moved by selfish motives that detract from "perfect impartiality." Lincoln thus appeals to our knowledge of human nature as a ground for moral discussion rather than the Bible.
But my critics--the proponents of the divine command theory of morality--would say that we cannot recognize the immorality of slavery by purely natural experience. After all, if the slaveholder is satisfying his natural desires for dominance and wealth by exploiting slaves, why should he not think slavery is moral? To see the immorality of slavery, we must move beyond nature to some supernatural morality--the morality of divine command as expressed in the Bible.
But what about the Bible? Is the Bible clearly against slavery? If we look at the "squabble" over the Bible's meaning, can we be sure that Ross is wrong in claiming that the Bible shows God commanding that slavery is right?
Like my critics, Ross espouses a divine command theory of morality. To say that standards of right and wrong exist as natural facts independently of God's will is, Ross insists, atheism. Ross's alternative is that right and wrong are contingent products of God's will. We know what is right or wrong only because, and to the extent that, we know whether God has declared it right or wrong. And for this, we must turn to the Bible as God's revelation of His will. Therefore, we cannot know whether slavery is right or wrong except by seeing what the Bible teaches about God's will as to slavery.
And what does the Bible teach about God's will concerning slavery? The Old Testament clearly sanctions slavery. The ancient Hebrews practiced it, and God commanded it. Similarly, in the New Testament, the Christians accept slavery as practiced by the ancient Romans. Paul teaches slaves to obey their masters, just as he teaches children to obey their parents, and wives to obey their husbands. Ross goes over all the relevant biblical passages to show the endorsement of slavery.
But what about the biblical arguments of the abolitionists--arguments that appealed to the teachings about being created in God's image, about universal love, and about the Golden Rule? Ross responds to each of these arguments by showing that the Bible clearly teaches that human beings are commanded to conform to relationships of authority in which some people are to submit to the authority of their superiors. Children must submit to parents. Wives must submit to husbands. Subjects must submit to government. Slaves must submit to masters. So the teaching of universal love must be interpreted in the light of these moral obligations to submit to authority. That we are all created in God's image does not mean that we are all the same. Children need to submit to the authority of their parents, because the circumstances of children make them dependent on parental care. Such relationships of inferiors and superiors run throughout society, and they are sanctioned by God.
This leads Ross to denounce the "self-evident truths" of the Declaration of Independence as an atheistic teaching of Thomas Jefferson that contradicts the Bible. The Bible does not teach that all human beings are born absolutely equal in their natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This teaching comes not from the Bible but from the "social compact" tradition of John Locke as adopted by atheists like Tom Paine and Jefferson.
To me, this shows how religious morality--especially biblical morality--can be unreliable, which forces us to fall back on our natural moral sense as rooted in our evolved human nature. Against this, my critics appeal to what they take to be the moral universalism of biblical religion. But this appeal to biblical morality is always vague. They never explain exactly how the Bible specifies our moral norms. And in the case of slavery, they just assume without argument that the Bible is clearly opposed to slavery, and so they never respond at all to those like Ross who support their pro-slavery position with meticulous biblical exegesis.
Lincoln saw this problem with great clarity. In the theological crisis of the Civil War, "both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other."
For just a few samples of the many posts I have written on this topic, go here, here, here, here, and here.
Fred Ross's book can be found at various places online. For example, here.
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Ross Slavery Ordained of God. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Ross Slavery Ordained of God. Sort by date Show all posts
Friday, August 15, 2008
Saturday, June 16, 2018
The "Supreme Judge" and "Divine Providence" in the Declaration of Independence
There are four references to a deity in the Declaration of Independence. At the beginning of the document, the first two references are to "the laws of Nature and of Nature's God" and to the "Creator." Then, at the end, in the penultimate sentence, there is a third reference in the formal declaration of independence: "We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states." The final reference is in the last sentence: "And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor."
Thus, God's government of the world has three branches: the legislative (the laws of Nature's God), the executive (Creator and Providence), and the judicial (Supreme Judge).
"Appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions" suggests the need for divine judgment as a sanction for law and morality. Does human law and morality require belief in divine rewards and punishments? Does that belief include a belief in the immortality of the soul in an afterlife where God can mete out eternal rewards in Heaven and eternal punishments in Hell? And if so, does a Darwinian science of human evolution support or subvert those religious beliefs?
And if we must appeal to the Supreme Judge, how does He promulgate His judgments? If the Supreme Judge is Nature's God, then we might have to rely on our human rational understanding of nature, in which case we would not need any supernatural revelation.
But if nature is not enough, and we do need some special revelation of God's supernatural message, we might look to the Bible, although the Declaration never refers to the Bible or any other holy book. So, for example, recently Attorney General Jeff Sessions has quoted from the Bible as supporting the controversial policy of the Trump administration for taking children away from parents who have entered the United States illegally. Many Christians, including evangelical Christians who have supported Trump, have denounced this policy as immoral. Sessions quoted from the thirteenth chapter of Romans where Paul apparently declares that the powers of government are ordained by God, and thus Christians have a duty to obey the government: "Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation" (Romans 13:1-2). Since this policy of taking children away from parents who have crossed the borders illegally is a legal order of the government, Sessions indicates, those who resist this policy are resisting an ordinance of God, and they will be punished with damnation.
In response to Sessions, some Christians have pointed out that this same thirteenth chapter of Romans commands "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" (13:9), and kidnapping children seems contrary to this commandment.
Some Christians have also pointed out that the 13th chapter of Romans was quoted by proslavery Christians to support obedience to the laws enforcing slavery. In Slavery Ordained of God (1857J), the Reverend Fred Ross, a prominent Presbyterian minister in Alabama, cited Romans 13 and many other biblical teachings as supporting slavery. Moreover, he argued, Romans 13 shows that the Declaration of Independence is a work of infidelity contrary to God's revelation in the Bible, because if government is ordained of God, then it is wrong to teach that government's authority comes from the consent of the people. I will say more about Ross's argument in a future post on slavery and the Declaration.
This indicates the problem in appealing to the divine revelation of the Bible as a guide to the judgments of the Supreme Judge: we often cannot agree on how to interpret the Bible and how to apply it to our lives. As with any book, the language of the Bible is open to conflicting interpretations, as manifest in the history of Judaism and Christianity. The American founders certainly saw this problem. In The Federalist (no. 37), James Madison observed: "When the Almighty himself condescends to address mankind in their own language, his meaning, luminous as it must be, is rendered dim and doubtful by the cloudy medium through which it is communicated."
Nevertheless, many of the American colonists settling in the New World in the seventeenth century thought the legal language of the Bible was clear enough to incorporate the Mosaic laws of the Old Testament into their colonial constitutions. For example, the "Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts" of 1647 functioned as a constitution for Massachusetts, and it included many Mosaic laws in addition to English common law and what was considered natural law. Part of this was a legally established Church that could punish heretics and infidels (Lutz, 1998, 95-135).
After the Declaration of Independence, however, those framing new state constitutions and the Articles of Confederation relied hardly at all on the divinely revealed laws of the Bible. In his Defense of the Constitutions of the United States of America (1786-1787), John Adams explained: "The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature; and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history." Those who formed these new American governments did not claim "interviews with the gods" or "the inspiration of Heaven." These thirteen governments were contrived "merely by the use of reason and the senses," and founded "on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretense of miracle or mystery." This experiment has succeeded so well, Adams concluded, that "it can no longer be called in question, whether authority in magistrates and obedience of citizens can be grounded on reason, morality, and the Christian religion, without the monkery of priests, or the knavery of politicians" (Adams, 2000, 117-19).
But notice that even as Adams scorns the pretense of grounding governmental authority on "the monkery of priests" who might claim "interviews with the gods," he still appeals to "the Christian religion" as important for enforcing political authority and obedience to the laws. So if it doesn't mean legally enforcing the Mosaic laws and a politically established Church, what does it mean for government to be grounded on "the Christian religion"?
In an often-quoted passage of George Washington's Farewell Address, Washington insisted that religion was necessary for popular morality:
Similarly, while Thomas Jefferson thought the Christian religion could support morality, religious belief was not absolutely necessary for moral conduct, because there was a natural moral sense inherent in human nature that could be known by natural human experience even without religious belief. In a letter to Peter Carr (August 10, 1787), Jefferson laid out a plan of education for him, including the study of moral philosophy and religion. He advised:
In private, however, in conversations and correspondence with his friends, he professed to believe in the purely moral teachings of Jesus, once they were cleansed of the corruptions coming from Platonic Christianity. He thought that Jesus taught "the principles of pure deism." "To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; & believing he never claimed any other" (letter to Benjamin Rush, April 21, 1803). In the same letter where he identified himself as an Epicurean, Jefferson also identified Jesus as a "benevolent moralist," whose moral teaching needed to be rescued from the "artificial systems" of Christian sects, which included "the immaculate conception of Jesus, his deification, the creation of the world by him, his miraculous powers, his resurrection and visible ascension, his corporeal presence in the Eucharist, the Trinity; original sin, atonement, regeneration, election, orders of Hierarchy, etc." (letter to William Short, October 31, 1819). In other words, the corruptions of true Christianity included most of the fundamental doctrines of orthodox Christianity!
Jefferson's account of the moral teaching of Jesus striped of all the "artificial systems" looks like what Spinoza identified as "the dogmas of universal faith"--"that there exists a supreme being who loves justice and charity, and that, to be saved, all people must obey and venerate Him by practicing justice and charity towards their neighbor . . . or love of one's neighbor" (Theological-Political Treatise, 14.10).
To extract this pure moral teaching of Jesus from the Bible, Jefferson prepared his own revised version of the Bible. He went through some Greek, Latin, French, and English translations of the Bible; he read the four gospels--Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John--and cut out those passages that represented the true life and teachings of Jesus; and he then pasted these excerpts on pages with four columns so that the Greek, Latin, French, and English texts were parallel. He arranged them in the chronological order of the life of Jesus from birth to death. He cut out all the references to miracles--including the incarnation of Jesus as the Son of God, the resurrection of the crucified Jesus, the water being turned into wine, the multitudes being fed on five loaves of bread and two fishes, and so on. He gave it the title of The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth Extracted Textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French & English. He kept this for his private use. It was never seen outside his family until it was sold to the Smithsonian Institution in 1895. It was later published under the title Jefferson's Bible. In 2011, the Smithsonian Institution published a beautiful facsimile edition of the original book.
Like Jefferson and the other deists among the American founders, Charles Darwin found it hard to believe in the miracles of the Bible: "the more we know of the fixed laws of nature, the more incredible do miracles become." He finally concluded that the Bible could not be a divine revelation. And yet he saw "the morality of the New Testament" as "beautiful" (Autobiography, 86). In particular, he quoted Jesus' statement of the golden rule--"As ye would that men should do to you, do ye to them likewise" (Matthew 7:12)--as "the foundation of morality" (Descent of Man, 151).
Darwin thought that "the conviction of the existence of an all-seeing Deity has had a potent influence on the advance of morality," although the idea of "a universal and beneficent Creator" was not instinctive but arose only at the end of a long history of cultural evolution (Descent, 682).
Darwin believed that morality could be explained as rooted in the natural evolution of a moral sense or the moral sentiments, as understood by David Hume and Adam Smith. "Any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man" (Descent, 121). "Ultimately our moral sense or conscience becomes a highly complex sentiment--originating in the social instincts, largely guided by the approbation of our fellow-men, ruled by reason, self-interest, and in later times by deep religious feelings, and confirmed by instruction and habit" (Descent, 157).
For this moral sense, Darwin believed, the "reverence or fear of the Gods or Spirits" is "most important, although not necessary." For example, we can reject the belief that "the abhorrence of incest is due to our possessing a special God-implanted conscience," because we can explain the incest taboo as rooted in an evolved instinctive disgust towards sexual mating with close relatives (Descent, 138-39, 688; Variation of Animals and Plants, 2:104).
Darwin's evolutionary theory of morality has been deepened and confirmed by recent research in the evolutionary psychology of morality by those like Edward Wilson, Jonathan Haidt, and Joshua Greene. (I have written about this here, here, and here.)
The importance of religious belief in moralistic "Big Gods" for the enforcement of morality in large agrarian states has been shown by Ara Norenzayan and his colleagues. But they have also shown that with moral progress in cultural evolution, it is now possible in modern societies for people to be moral without religion--or good without God--although there is still some culturally evolved popular suspicion of atheists as less moral than religious believers. (I have written about this here and here.)
REFERENCES
Adams, John. 2000. The Political Writings of John Adams. Ed. George W. Carey. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing.
Darwin, Charles. 1959. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809-1882. Ed. Nora Barlow. New York: W. W. Norton.
Darwin, Charles. 1998. The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication. 2 vols. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Darwin, Charles. 2004. The Descent of Man. New York: Penguin Classics.
Jefferson, Thomas. 1984. Writings. Ed. Merrill D. Peterson. New York: Library of America.
Jefferson, Thomas. 2011. The Jefferson Bible: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth Extracted Textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French & English. With essays by Harry R. Rubenstein, Barbara Clark Smith & Janice Stagnitto Ellis. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books.
Lutz, Donald, ed. 1998. Colonial Origins of the American Constitution: A Documentary History. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.
Ross, Fred. 1857. Slavery Ordained of God. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott.
Spinoza, Benedict de. 2016. Collected Works of Spinoza. Ed. & trans. Edwin Curley. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Thus, God's government of the world has three branches: the legislative (the laws of Nature's God), the executive (Creator and Providence), and the judicial (Supreme Judge).
"Appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions" suggests the need for divine judgment as a sanction for law and morality. Does human law and morality require belief in divine rewards and punishments? Does that belief include a belief in the immortality of the soul in an afterlife where God can mete out eternal rewards in Heaven and eternal punishments in Hell? And if so, does a Darwinian science of human evolution support or subvert those religious beliefs?
And if we must appeal to the Supreme Judge, how does He promulgate His judgments? If the Supreme Judge is Nature's God, then we might have to rely on our human rational understanding of nature, in which case we would not need any supernatural revelation.
But if nature is not enough, and we do need some special revelation of God's supernatural message, we might look to the Bible, although the Declaration never refers to the Bible or any other holy book. So, for example, recently Attorney General Jeff Sessions has quoted from the Bible as supporting the controversial policy of the Trump administration for taking children away from parents who have entered the United States illegally. Many Christians, including evangelical Christians who have supported Trump, have denounced this policy as immoral. Sessions quoted from the thirteenth chapter of Romans where Paul apparently declares that the powers of government are ordained by God, and thus Christians have a duty to obey the government: "Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation" (Romans 13:1-2). Since this policy of taking children away from parents who have crossed the borders illegally is a legal order of the government, Sessions indicates, those who resist this policy are resisting an ordinance of God, and they will be punished with damnation.
In response to Sessions, some Christians have pointed out that this same thirteenth chapter of Romans commands "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" (13:9), and kidnapping children seems contrary to this commandment.
Some Christians have also pointed out that the 13th chapter of Romans was quoted by proslavery Christians to support obedience to the laws enforcing slavery. In Slavery Ordained of God (1857J), the Reverend Fred Ross, a prominent Presbyterian minister in Alabama, cited Romans 13 and many other biblical teachings as supporting slavery. Moreover, he argued, Romans 13 shows that the Declaration of Independence is a work of infidelity contrary to God's revelation in the Bible, because if government is ordained of God, then it is wrong to teach that government's authority comes from the consent of the people. I will say more about Ross's argument in a future post on slavery and the Declaration.
This indicates the problem in appealing to the divine revelation of the Bible as a guide to the judgments of the Supreme Judge: we often cannot agree on how to interpret the Bible and how to apply it to our lives. As with any book, the language of the Bible is open to conflicting interpretations, as manifest in the history of Judaism and Christianity. The American founders certainly saw this problem. In The Federalist (no. 37), James Madison observed: "When the Almighty himself condescends to address mankind in their own language, his meaning, luminous as it must be, is rendered dim and doubtful by the cloudy medium through which it is communicated."
Nevertheless, many of the American colonists settling in the New World in the seventeenth century thought the legal language of the Bible was clear enough to incorporate the Mosaic laws of the Old Testament into their colonial constitutions. For example, the "Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts" of 1647 functioned as a constitution for Massachusetts, and it included many Mosaic laws in addition to English common law and what was considered natural law. Part of this was a legally established Church that could punish heretics and infidels (Lutz, 1998, 95-135).
After the Declaration of Independence, however, those framing new state constitutions and the Articles of Confederation relied hardly at all on the divinely revealed laws of the Bible. In his Defense of the Constitutions of the United States of America (1786-1787), John Adams explained: "The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature; and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history." Those who formed these new American governments did not claim "interviews with the gods" or "the inspiration of Heaven." These thirteen governments were contrived "merely by the use of reason and the senses," and founded "on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretense of miracle or mystery." This experiment has succeeded so well, Adams concluded, that "it can no longer be called in question, whether authority in magistrates and obedience of citizens can be grounded on reason, morality, and the Christian religion, without the monkery of priests, or the knavery of politicians" (Adams, 2000, 117-19).
But notice that even as Adams scorns the pretense of grounding governmental authority on "the monkery of priests" who might claim "interviews with the gods," he still appeals to "the Christian religion" as important for enforcing political authority and obedience to the laws. So if it doesn't mean legally enforcing the Mosaic laws and a politically established Church, what does it mean for government to be grounded on "the Christian religion"?
In an often-quoted passage of George Washington's Farewell Address, Washington insisted that religion was necessary for popular morality:
"And let us indulge with caution the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle."And yet we can't help noticing that while stressing the importance of religion for the "national morality" of most people, Washington suggests that a few people with "minds of peculiar structure" don't need religion for their moral education.
Similarly, while Thomas Jefferson thought the Christian religion could support morality, religious belief was not absolutely necessary for moral conduct, because there was a natural moral sense inherent in human nature that could be known by natural human experience even without religious belief. In a letter to Peter Carr (August 10, 1787), Jefferson laid out a plan of education for him, including the study of moral philosophy and religion. He advised:
"Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of it's consequences. If it ends in a belief that there is no god, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort & pleasantness you feel in it's exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you. If you find reason to believe there is a god, a consciousness that you are acting under his eye, & that he approves you, will be a vast additional incitement; if that there be a future state, the hope of a happy existence in that increases the appetite to deserve it" (Jefferson 1984, 903).Jefferson refused to speak in public about his religious beliefs, because he insisted that religion was a private matter of conscience between oneself and God, and that freedom of conscience meant that no one should be forced into a public confession of one's faith or lack of faith. Even in the presidential election of 1800, when ministers sermonized against him as an infidel or atheist, Jefferson refused to respond to this charge in public.
In private, however, in conversations and correspondence with his friends, he professed to believe in the purely moral teachings of Jesus, once they were cleansed of the corruptions coming from Platonic Christianity. He thought that Jesus taught "the principles of pure deism." "To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; & believing he never claimed any other" (letter to Benjamin Rush, April 21, 1803). In the same letter where he identified himself as an Epicurean, Jefferson also identified Jesus as a "benevolent moralist," whose moral teaching needed to be rescued from the "artificial systems" of Christian sects, which included "the immaculate conception of Jesus, his deification, the creation of the world by him, his miraculous powers, his resurrection and visible ascension, his corporeal presence in the Eucharist, the Trinity; original sin, atonement, regeneration, election, orders of Hierarchy, etc." (letter to William Short, October 31, 1819). In other words, the corruptions of true Christianity included most of the fundamental doctrines of orthodox Christianity!
Jefferson's account of the moral teaching of Jesus striped of all the "artificial systems" looks like what Spinoza identified as "the dogmas of universal faith"--"that there exists a supreme being who loves justice and charity, and that, to be saved, all people must obey and venerate Him by practicing justice and charity towards their neighbor . . . or love of one's neighbor" (Theological-Political Treatise, 14.10).
To extract this pure moral teaching of Jesus from the Bible, Jefferson prepared his own revised version of the Bible. He went through some Greek, Latin, French, and English translations of the Bible; he read the four gospels--Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John--and cut out those passages that represented the true life and teachings of Jesus; and he then pasted these excerpts on pages with four columns so that the Greek, Latin, French, and English texts were parallel. He arranged them in the chronological order of the life of Jesus from birth to death. He cut out all the references to miracles--including the incarnation of Jesus as the Son of God, the resurrection of the crucified Jesus, the water being turned into wine, the multitudes being fed on five loaves of bread and two fishes, and so on. He gave it the title of The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth Extracted Textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French & English. He kept this for his private use. It was never seen outside his family until it was sold to the Smithsonian Institution in 1895. It was later published under the title Jefferson's Bible. In 2011, the Smithsonian Institution published a beautiful facsimile edition of the original book.
Like Jefferson and the other deists among the American founders, Charles Darwin found it hard to believe in the miracles of the Bible: "the more we know of the fixed laws of nature, the more incredible do miracles become." He finally concluded that the Bible could not be a divine revelation. And yet he saw "the morality of the New Testament" as "beautiful" (Autobiography, 86). In particular, he quoted Jesus' statement of the golden rule--"As ye would that men should do to you, do ye to them likewise" (Matthew 7:12)--as "the foundation of morality" (Descent of Man, 151).
Darwin thought that "the conviction of the existence of an all-seeing Deity has had a potent influence on the advance of morality," although the idea of "a universal and beneficent Creator" was not instinctive but arose only at the end of a long history of cultural evolution (Descent, 682).
Darwin believed that morality could be explained as rooted in the natural evolution of a moral sense or the moral sentiments, as understood by David Hume and Adam Smith. "Any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man" (Descent, 121). "Ultimately our moral sense or conscience becomes a highly complex sentiment--originating in the social instincts, largely guided by the approbation of our fellow-men, ruled by reason, self-interest, and in later times by deep religious feelings, and confirmed by instruction and habit" (Descent, 157).
For this moral sense, Darwin believed, the "reverence or fear of the Gods or Spirits" is "most important, although not necessary." For example, we can reject the belief that "the abhorrence of incest is due to our possessing a special God-implanted conscience," because we can explain the incest taboo as rooted in an evolved instinctive disgust towards sexual mating with close relatives (Descent, 138-39, 688; Variation of Animals and Plants, 2:104).
Darwin's evolutionary theory of morality has been deepened and confirmed by recent research in the evolutionary psychology of morality by those like Edward Wilson, Jonathan Haidt, and Joshua Greene. (I have written about this here, here, and here.)
The importance of religious belief in moralistic "Big Gods" for the enforcement of morality in large agrarian states has been shown by Ara Norenzayan and his colleagues. But they have also shown that with moral progress in cultural evolution, it is now possible in modern societies for people to be moral without religion--or good without God--although there is still some culturally evolved popular suspicion of atheists as less moral than religious believers. (I have written about this here and here.)
REFERENCES
Adams, John. 2000. The Political Writings of John Adams. Ed. George W. Carey. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing.
Darwin, Charles. 1959. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809-1882. Ed. Nora Barlow. New York: W. W. Norton.
Darwin, Charles. 1998. The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication. 2 vols. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Darwin, Charles. 2004. The Descent of Man. New York: Penguin Classics.
Jefferson, Thomas. 1984. Writings. Ed. Merrill D. Peterson. New York: Library of America.
Jefferson, Thomas. 2011. The Jefferson Bible: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth Extracted Textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French & English. With essays by Harry R. Rubenstein, Barbara Clark Smith & Janice Stagnitto Ellis. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books.
Lutz, Donald, ed. 1998. Colonial Origins of the American Constitution: A Documentary History. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.
Ross, Fred. 1857. Slavery Ordained of God. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott.
Spinoza, Benedict de. 2016. Collected Works of Spinoza. Ed. & trans. Edwin Curley. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Friday, February 26, 2016
Correcting the Bible on Slavery
Pointing to the Bible, Marco Rubio has said: "You'll find all the answers in that book." That's his way of appealing to evangelical Christian voters who believe that a literal reading of the Bible as God's inerrant revelation does indeed give us all the answers.
This has been a powerful tradition in American political life--the belief of many American Christians that we can find the answers to all of our moral, political, scientific, and religious questions through a careful reading of the Bible. In response to my arguments for "Darwinian natural right," for natural standards of right rooted in our evolved human nature, one of the most common objections has been that morality is impossible without the revelation of a divine moral law in the Bible. Even some evolutionary theorists have provided some support for this by arguing that the cultural evolution of moral gods--such as the God of the Bible--beginning about 5,000 years ago made it possible for human beings to live in huge communities of people who cooperated with one another because they thought they were being watched by a moral God enforcing His moral law.
But sometimes the Bible does not give clear and indisputable answers to our great moral questions, and thus some moral debates cannot be resolved by the Bible. The most dramatic example of that in American political history was the debate over slavery leading to the Civil War. As Mark Noll indicates in his book, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, some Christians saw the Bible as proslavery, and others saw it as antislavery. The text of the Bible was not clearly on one side or the other. This became a great "theological crisis," because it meant that while Americans had always looked to the Bible as the inerrant moral authority, it failed to resolve the deepest moral and political controversy in American history, and thus the only way to answer the question of what the Bible taught about slavery was to go to war. And in that war, as Lincoln said in his Second Inaugural, "Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other."
50 years ago, as a young man growing up in Texas, I struggled with this problem. Like Rubio, I had been taught by my Southern Baptist ministers that all the answers were to be found in the Bible, and therefore that Baptists should carefully read the Bible. It was recommended that by reading a few chapters of the Bible every day, starting with Genesis and ending with Revelation, one could read the entire Bible over a year. I did that for five years. But I was bothered by some of what I read, particularly the passages that seemed to accept slavery without any condemnation. When I learned that the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, was founded in 1845 to defend slavery as sanctioned by the Bible against the antislavery arguments of the Northern Baptists, I was deeply troubled by this and by the refusal of American Baptists to confess that this had been a mistake. Later, in 1995, at the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Southern Baptist Convention, the Convention finally passed a resolution apologizing for its mistake in interpreting the Bible in supporting slavery and racism. But that resolution says nothing about the many verses in the Bible that speak about slavery as though it is acceptable.
In later years, I studied the American debate over the Bible's handling of slavery, which became part of my wider study of the Darwinian evolution of a moral sense condemning slavery. Much of my thinking on this went into Chapter 7 of Darwinian Natural Right. Now I am finally ready to draw some conclusions about the Biblical teaching on slavery.
I have come to two conclusions. First, if one looks at the verses in the Bible that specifically mention slavery, one can see that slavery is accepted and never condemned as wrong. Second, if one wants to correct this Biblical endorsement of slavery by finding a way to read the Bible as antislavery, then one must appeal to some general moral principles of Biblical teaching--such as the Golden Rule, for example--that conform to our natural moral sense for condemning slavery.
In the antebellum writing on the Bible and slavery, people recognized this point. For example, James De Bow, writing on "Slavery and the Bible" for the September 1850 issue of De Bow's Review, explained:
So some interpreters who wanted to deny that the Bible was endorsing slavery could argue that "servants" were not really "slaves," but rather hired servants. But this is not a credible interpretation. In the King James translation, the word "servant" appears in the Old Testament most often as a translation of the Hebrew word ebed, which denotes "bondage"; and in the New Testament, "servant" most often translates the Greek word doulos. Moreover, the Bible distinguishes between "hired servants" and "bond servants," and the "bond servants" were those who had been bought with money and held as the property of the master (see, for example, Genesis 17:12, Leviticus 25:44-46, Exodus 21:20-21, 26-32).
There are places in the Bible where God or His angels have clear opportunities to condemn slavery as wrong, but instead of that, they sanction slavery as right. One example is when Abraham allows Sarah to beat her bondwoman Hagar, and Hagar runs away. Hagar meets an angel of the Lord. Instead of helping her to escape, the angel tells her: "Return to thy mistress, and submit thyself under her hands" (Genesis 16:9).
Christians might think that even if the Old Testament supports slavery, then surely the New Testament condemns it as a violation of Christian love. But it is startling that while Jesus overruled many of the regulations of the Old Testament--such as those allowing for polygamy and divorce--he never said anything against slavery. Furthermore, Paul and Peter often tell slaves to obey their masters and not to run away. Even when slaves are converted to Christianity, this gives Christian masters no reason to emancipate their Christian slaves. (See 1 Corinthians 7:21; Ephesians 6:5; Colossians 3:22, 4:1; 1 Timothy 6:1-2; 1 Peter 2:18).
Some abolitionists thought they have found a specific condemnation of slavery in the Old Testament's punishment of "man-stealing": "And he that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death" (Exodus 21:16). Doesn't this mean that slave traders should be punished with death? But a few lines later in this same passage, it is said: "And if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and he die under his hand; he shall be surely punished. Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his money" (Exodus 21:20-21). So it seems that holding a slave as property does not violate the rule against "man-stealing." This must be so, because the Hebrews were permitted to hold slaves.
Although a reading of the Bible as antislavery cannot be based on specific Biblical condemnations of slavery as wrong, such a reading can, and has been, justified by appealing to some of the general moral principles of the Bible that are not specifically applied to slavery in the Bible. The two most common principles employed here are the creation of Adam and Eve in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), which can be read as an affirmation of human equality, and the Golden Rule as stated by Jesus (Matthew 7:12), which can be read as suggesting that enslaving a human being is not treating that human being as one would wish to be treated. People who say that slavery is good don't honestly believe that, because they never choose the good of it for themselves. Lincoln and many others have cited this as a Biblical basis for recognizing slavery as wrong.
But as Fred Ross (in Slavery Ordained of God, 1857) and others have pointed out, it's not clear that these general moral principles must be interpreted as condemning slavery. First, it's not clear that God's creation of human beings in His image means that they are all equal. Here's the verse: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them" (Genesis 1:27). Far from creating all men equal, Ross observed, God here created humanity as "male and female," so that they are not equal in body and mind. God made the woman "out of the man" (Genesis 2:23); and He made "the man the image and glory of God, but the woman for the glory of the man. For the man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman, but the woman for the man" (1 Corinthians 11:7-9); and he made the woman to be the weaker vessel (1 Peter 3:7). Moreover, just as wives are to obey their husbands, and children to obey their parents, slaves are to obey their masters (Ephesians 5:22-24, 6:1-5). Insofar as slaves are inferior in body and mind to their masters, the slaves are naturally better off being ruled by their masters.
Similarly, Ross argued, it's not clear that the Golden Rule requires equality in human social relationships. If the Golden Rule means that we ought to do unto others as we would have them do unto us if we were in similar circumstances, then we can see that different circumstances justify differences in treatment. We do not rightly treat children the way we treat adults, because we know that children depend on the care of adults. Similarly, we do not rightly treat slaves the way we treat masters if slaves are naturally weaker in body and mind in ways that make them dependent on the care of their masters.
And yet both of these arguments fail if one denies Ross's assumption that some human beings are by nature so inferior in body and mind that they are like perpetual children dependent on the care of those superior to them. Except for those few human beings who might be born so mentally disabled that they are better off being under the lifetime care of others, it's hard to imagine that any group of human beings would be naturally adapted for enslavement. As members of the same evolved human species, we can recognize the equality of all human beings as possessing a common human nature. Although human beings are naturally unequal in many respects, they are equal in those minimal emotional and intellectual capacities that sustain a moral sense and thus identify them as members of the human species. All normal human beings will resist exploitation and demand social cooperation based on reciprocal exchange. They will be enslaved only when they are held down by brute force.
If this is true, then we can apply the Bible's Golden Rule to condemn slavery as wrong, and thus correct those passages of the Bible that seem to support slavery. Indeed, that is exactly what most Christians have done: they overlook those Biblical passages that specifically recognize slavery, and they stress the general principles of Biblical morality that show slavery to be unjust exploitation. Those general principles appeal to our naturally evolved moral sense. Charles Darwin saw this, in The Descent of Man, when explained how the evolution of the moral sense could lead to Jesus's statement of the Golden Rule as what "lies at the foundation of morality."
Before and during the Civil War, however, American Christians could not agree on this corrected interpretation of the Bible's teaching on slavery. Answering the question of how to interpret the Bible required recourse to arms. Or, as Noll said, "it was left to those consummate theologians, the Reverend Doctors Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, to decide what in fact the Bible actually meant" (50).
When I first read this remark by Noll about Grant and Sherman deciding what the Bible meant, it bothered me a lot. But as I thought more about it, I began to see that there is a sense in which might really does make right. Justice is enforced by the natural propensity of human beings to retaliate against oppression and meet force with force. Slaves had many ways to resist their slavery, including violent resistance and running away. Southerners were deeply fearful of slave insurrections. One primary reason for Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was to recruit slaves into fighting in the Union army. Harriet Beecher Stowe, in Uncle Tom's Cabin, seemed to teach through the example of Uncle Tom that Christian slaves should love their enemies and not fight back; but even she, especially in her novel Dred, seemed to concede that manly honor required violent resistance to oppression.
Some previous posts on this can be found here, here, here, here, here., here., here, here., here, and here.
This has been a powerful tradition in American political life--the belief of many American Christians that we can find the answers to all of our moral, political, scientific, and religious questions through a careful reading of the Bible. In response to my arguments for "Darwinian natural right," for natural standards of right rooted in our evolved human nature, one of the most common objections has been that morality is impossible without the revelation of a divine moral law in the Bible. Even some evolutionary theorists have provided some support for this by arguing that the cultural evolution of moral gods--such as the God of the Bible--beginning about 5,000 years ago made it possible for human beings to live in huge communities of people who cooperated with one another because they thought they were being watched by a moral God enforcing His moral law.
But sometimes the Bible does not give clear and indisputable answers to our great moral questions, and thus some moral debates cannot be resolved by the Bible. The most dramatic example of that in American political history was the debate over slavery leading to the Civil War. As Mark Noll indicates in his book, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, some Christians saw the Bible as proslavery, and others saw it as antislavery. The text of the Bible was not clearly on one side or the other. This became a great "theological crisis," because it meant that while Americans had always looked to the Bible as the inerrant moral authority, it failed to resolve the deepest moral and political controversy in American history, and thus the only way to answer the question of what the Bible taught about slavery was to go to war. And in that war, as Lincoln said in his Second Inaugural, "Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other."
50 years ago, as a young man growing up in Texas, I struggled with this problem. Like Rubio, I had been taught by my Southern Baptist ministers that all the answers were to be found in the Bible, and therefore that Baptists should carefully read the Bible. It was recommended that by reading a few chapters of the Bible every day, starting with Genesis and ending with Revelation, one could read the entire Bible over a year. I did that for five years. But I was bothered by some of what I read, particularly the passages that seemed to accept slavery without any condemnation. When I learned that the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, was founded in 1845 to defend slavery as sanctioned by the Bible against the antislavery arguments of the Northern Baptists, I was deeply troubled by this and by the refusal of American Baptists to confess that this had been a mistake. Later, in 1995, at the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Southern Baptist Convention, the Convention finally passed a resolution apologizing for its mistake in interpreting the Bible in supporting slavery and racism. But that resolution says nothing about the many verses in the Bible that speak about slavery as though it is acceptable.
In later years, I studied the American debate over the Bible's handling of slavery, which became part of my wider study of the Darwinian evolution of a moral sense condemning slavery. Much of my thinking on this went into Chapter 7 of Darwinian Natural Right. Now I am finally ready to draw some conclusions about the Biblical teaching on slavery.
I have come to two conclusions. First, if one looks at the verses in the Bible that specifically mention slavery, one can see that slavery is accepted and never condemned as wrong. Second, if one wants to correct this Biblical endorsement of slavery by finding a way to read the Bible as antislavery, then one must appeal to some general moral principles of Biblical teaching--such as the Golden Rule, for example--that conform to our natural moral sense for condemning slavery.
In the antebellum writing on the Bible and slavery, people recognized this point. For example, James De Bow, writing on "Slavery and the Bible" for the September 1850 issue of De Bow's Review, explained:
"The anti-slavery party maintain, that the Bible teaches nothing directly upon the subject, but, that, in holding slaves, we are guilty of a moral wrong. This mode of reasoning would be perfectly fair, if the Bible really taught nothing directly upon the subject of slavery: but when that book applies the principles it lays down to the particular subject in controversy, we must take the application to be correct. We think we can show, that the Bible teaches clearly and conclusively that the holding of slaves is right; and if so, no deduction from general principles can make it wrong, if that book is true."If one is looking for the verses that specifically mention slavery, the King James translation (favored by American Evangelicals) is confusing because the word "slave" appears only twice. In Jeremiah 2:14, the word "slave" appears in the translation, although there is no Hebrew word for it in this verse. In Revelation 18:13, "slave" translates the Greek word doulos, which really is the most common Greek word for "slave." In all of the other Biblical verses that seem to refer to slaves, the King James translation most often uses the word "servant," and sometimes other words such as "manservant," "maidservant," "bondman," or "bondmaid."
So some interpreters who wanted to deny that the Bible was endorsing slavery could argue that "servants" were not really "slaves," but rather hired servants. But this is not a credible interpretation. In the King James translation, the word "servant" appears in the Old Testament most often as a translation of the Hebrew word ebed, which denotes "bondage"; and in the New Testament, "servant" most often translates the Greek word doulos. Moreover, the Bible distinguishes between "hired servants" and "bond servants," and the "bond servants" were those who had been bought with money and held as the property of the master (see, for example, Genesis 17:12, Leviticus 25:44-46, Exodus 21:20-21, 26-32).
There are places in the Bible where God or His angels have clear opportunities to condemn slavery as wrong, but instead of that, they sanction slavery as right. One example is when Abraham allows Sarah to beat her bondwoman Hagar, and Hagar runs away. Hagar meets an angel of the Lord. Instead of helping her to escape, the angel tells her: "Return to thy mistress, and submit thyself under her hands" (Genesis 16:9).
Christians might think that even if the Old Testament supports slavery, then surely the New Testament condemns it as a violation of Christian love. But it is startling that while Jesus overruled many of the regulations of the Old Testament--such as those allowing for polygamy and divorce--he never said anything against slavery. Furthermore, Paul and Peter often tell slaves to obey their masters and not to run away. Even when slaves are converted to Christianity, this gives Christian masters no reason to emancipate their Christian slaves. (See 1 Corinthians 7:21; Ephesians 6:5; Colossians 3:22, 4:1; 1 Timothy 6:1-2; 1 Peter 2:18).
Some abolitionists thought they have found a specific condemnation of slavery in the Old Testament's punishment of "man-stealing": "And he that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death" (Exodus 21:16). Doesn't this mean that slave traders should be punished with death? But a few lines later in this same passage, it is said: "And if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and he die under his hand; he shall be surely punished. Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his money" (Exodus 21:20-21). So it seems that holding a slave as property does not violate the rule against "man-stealing." This must be so, because the Hebrews were permitted to hold slaves.
Although a reading of the Bible as antislavery cannot be based on specific Biblical condemnations of slavery as wrong, such a reading can, and has been, justified by appealing to some of the general moral principles of the Bible that are not specifically applied to slavery in the Bible. The two most common principles employed here are the creation of Adam and Eve in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), which can be read as an affirmation of human equality, and the Golden Rule as stated by Jesus (Matthew 7:12), which can be read as suggesting that enslaving a human being is not treating that human being as one would wish to be treated. People who say that slavery is good don't honestly believe that, because they never choose the good of it for themselves. Lincoln and many others have cited this as a Biblical basis for recognizing slavery as wrong.
But as Fred Ross (in Slavery Ordained of God, 1857) and others have pointed out, it's not clear that these general moral principles must be interpreted as condemning slavery. First, it's not clear that God's creation of human beings in His image means that they are all equal. Here's the verse: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them" (Genesis 1:27). Far from creating all men equal, Ross observed, God here created humanity as "male and female," so that they are not equal in body and mind. God made the woman "out of the man" (Genesis 2:23); and He made "the man the image and glory of God, but the woman for the glory of the man. For the man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman, but the woman for the man" (1 Corinthians 11:7-9); and he made the woman to be the weaker vessel (1 Peter 3:7). Moreover, just as wives are to obey their husbands, and children to obey their parents, slaves are to obey their masters (Ephesians 5:22-24, 6:1-5). Insofar as slaves are inferior in body and mind to their masters, the slaves are naturally better off being ruled by their masters.
Similarly, Ross argued, it's not clear that the Golden Rule requires equality in human social relationships. If the Golden Rule means that we ought to do unto others as we would have them do unto us if we were in similar circumstances, then we can see that different circumstances justify differences in treatment. We do not rightly treat children the way we treat adults, because we know that children depend on the care of adults. Similarly, we do not rightly treat slaves the way we treat masters if slaves are naturally weaker in body and mind in ways that make them dependent on the care of their masters.
And yet both of these arguments fail if one denies Ross's assumption that some human beings are by nature so inferior in body and mind that they are like perpetual children dependent on the care of those superior to them. Except for those few human beings who might be born so mentally disabled that they are better off being under the lifetime care of others, it's hard to imagine that any group of human beings would be naturally adapted for enslavement. As members of the same evolved human species, we can recognize the equality of all human beings as possessing a common human nature. Although human beings are naturally unequal in many respects, they are equal in those minimal emotional and intellectual capacities that sustain a moral sense and thus identify them as members of the human species. All normal human beings will resist exploitation and demand social cooperation based on reciprocal exchange. They will be enslaved only when they are held down by brute force.
If this is true, then we can apply the Bible's Golden Rule to condemn slavery as wrong, and thus correct those passages of the Bible that seem to support slavery. Indeed, that is exactly what most Christians have done: they overlook those Biblical passages that specifically recognize slavery, and they stress the general principles of Biblical morality that show slavery to be unjust exploitation. Those general principles appeal to our naturally evolved moral sense. Charles Darwin saw this, in The Descent of Man, when explained how the evolution of the moral sense could lead to Jesus's statement of the Golden Rule as what "lies at the foundation of morality."
Before and during the Civil War, however, American Christians could not agree on this corrected interpretation of the Bible's teaching on slavery. Answering the question of how to interpret the Bible required recourse to arms. Or, as Noll said, "it was left to those consummate theologians, the Reverend Doctors Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, to decide what in fact the Bible actually meant" (50).
When I first read this remark by Noll about Grant and Sherman deciding what the Bible meant, it bothered me a lot. But as I thought more about it, I began to see that there is a sense in which might really does make right. Justice is enforced by the natural propensity of human beings to retaliate against oppression and meet force with force. Slaves had many ways to resist their slavery, including violent resistance and running away. Southerners were deeply fearful of slave insurrections. One primary reason for Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was to recruit slaves into fighting in the Union army. Harriet Beecher Stowe, in Uncle Tom's Cabin, seemed to teach through the example of Uncle Tom that Christian slaves should love their enemies and not fight back; but even she, especially in her novel Dred, seemed to concede that manly honor required violent resistance to oppression.
Some previous posts on this can be found here, here, here, here, here., here., here, here., here, and here.
Tuesday, August 24, 2021
Darwinian Conservatism Versus Metaphysical Conservatism: A Reply to Wiley, Price, and Sunshine
Conservatives need Charles Darwin.
Explaining why that is so was the purpose of my article in the Fall 2010 issue of The Intercollegiate Review. My article was entitled "Darwinian Conservatism Versus Metaphysical Conservatism." This was followed by John West's article criticizing my argument entitled "Darwin, Scientism, and the Misguided Quest for Darwinian Conservatism." My article can be found online. Some of the writing in this article came from blog posts here, here, and here.
Last week, the Theology Pugcast had a one-hour podcast discussion of my article. The three discussants were C. R. Wiley (a pastor in Vancouver, Washington), Thomas Price (a professor at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary), and Glenn Sunshine (Professor Emeritus of History at Central Connecticut State University). (I am grateful to Clifford Bates for drawing my attention to this podcast.)
The three discussants reach a common conclusion: Arnhart is wrong because he disagrees with us. They offer many assertions about how they are right, and I am wrong. But they offer very little evidence or argumentation to prove their assertions. Watch the video, if I am wrong, please correct me. Notice how Price laughs at the beginning, as if it is ridiculous that anyone would disagree with them.
I will comment on nine points of disagreement.
1. ARE THERE ANY DARWINIAN CONSERVATIVES?
Wiley begins by saying that he was shocked to see my article in The Intercollegiate Review, because while he generally agrees with the articles in IR, he disagrees fundamentally with my article. When he saw the title of the article, he assumed it would criticize Darwinian Conservatism and support Metaphysical Conservatism; and so he was deeply disturbed to see that it actually defended Darwinian Conservatism.
At first, he seems to deny that there are any Darwinian conservatives, because after all conservatism must be anti-Darwinian. But then he says that maybe there are some Darwinian conservatives, although he implies that they can't be real conservatives.
He is silent about my history of the incipient ideas of evolutionary conservatism beginning with David Hume, Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke, of how those ideas were picked up by Charles Darwin in his account of the evolution of morality, and of how those ideas were revived by conservatives like Friedrich Hayek and James Q. Wilson.
I set this empirical and evolutionary line of conservative thought against the transcendent and metaphysical conservatism of people like Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver. Kirk said that the "first canon" of conservative thought was "belief that a divine intent rules society as well as conscience, forging an eternal chain of right and duty," and consequently "politics is the art of apprehending and applying the Justice which is above nature," which assumes "a transcendent moral order." He connected this to "Burke's description of the state as a divinely ordained moral essence" and Burke's view of history as "the unfolding of Design." According to Kirk, the primary enemy of this metaphysical conservatism was Darwinian science. Similarly, Weaver insisted that a healthy cultural order required a "metaphysical dream of the world," so that people could imagine their cultural life as a "metaphysical community" fulfilling a cosmic purpose. And like Kirk, Weaver worried that Darwin's theory of evolution denied this "metaphysical dream" of cosmic order by explaining human beings as products of a natural evolutionary process governed by material causes that were not directed to any cosmic purposes.
Against this metaphysical conservatism, Hayek objected to the "obscurantism" of a conservative attitude that rejected Darwin's theory of evolution as morally corrupting. He elaborated his view of Burkean "Old Whig" liberalism as belonging to a British empiricist evolutionary tradition contrasted with a French rationalistic design tradition. In the evolutionary tradition of Hume, Smith, and Burke, Hayek explained, "it was shown that an evident order which was not the product of a designing human intelligence need not therefore be ascribed to the design of a higher, supernatural intelligence, but that there was a third possibility--the emergence of order as the result of adaptive evolution." Hayek suggested that Darwin's theory of biological evolution was derived from the theories of social evolution developed by the Scottish philosophers.
Notice that both sides of this debate appeal to Burke. As I show in my article, one can see in Burke's writings the split between the metaphysical and evolutionary versions of conservatism. On the one hand, Burke says that human morality must be grounded in a religious metaphysics of cosmic design; and he cites Plato's political theology of design (in Book 10 of Plato's Laws): the authority of human laws must be founded on a religious belief in cosmic moral order as part of a divinely designed universe in which the good are rewarded and the bad punished.
On the other hand, Burke rejected Richard Price's religious metaphysics of history and the Christian Platonism of his moral philosophy. Price argued against the moral naturalism of Hume and the Scottish moral sense philosophers, and he scorned the idea that morality was rooted in natural moral sentiments. He contended instead that moral knowledge was a rational activity of the mind in grasping the eternal and immutable metaphysical truths of God. Against Price's metaphysical morality, Burke evoked those "natural feelings" and "moral sentiments" that show "the natural sense of right and wrong" and "the moral constitution of the heart" as the empirical foundation in human nature of moral experience. Here he showed his agreement with the ideas of Hume and Smith, which would later be taken up by Darwin.
Early in his life, Burke had expressed his skepticism about metaphysical causes in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. He had explained that in looking for the "efficient cause" of sublimity and beauty, he did not pretend to explain the "ultimate cause," because he was pursuing a purely empirical inquiry into sense experience:
"That great chain of causes, which linking one to another even to the throne of God himself, can never be unraveled by any inquiry of ours. When we go but one step beyond the immediately sensible qualities of things, we go out of our depths. All we do after, is but a faint struggle, that shows we are in an element which does not belong to us."
I assume that Wiley, Price, and Sunshine would say that I am completely wrong about this history of conservative thought as split between empirical evolutionary ideas of natural morality and transcendent metaphysical ideas of cosmic moral order. But I can't be sure because they are silent about all of this.
2. TWO DIFFERENT METAPHYSICS? THE PROBLEM OF ULTIMATE EXPLANATION
They do say a lot, however, in criticizing the title of my article. "Darwinian Conservatism Versus Metaphysical Conservatism" implies that Darwinian conservatism is not metaphysical. On the contrary, they say, my Darwinian naturalism is actually a metaphysics; and so the dispute here is between two different metaphysics. This must be so because any fundamental view of reality must depend on some metaphysical first principles about the ultimate ground of all things. A naturalistic metaphysics assumes that Nature is the ultimate ground of Being. A theistic metaphysics assumes that God is the ultimate ground of Being.
If we define metaphysics as the branch of philosophy concerned with the first principles of all things, then Darwinian naturalism might seem to be metaphysical. But as I indicated in my article (pp. 22-23), I was using the word metaphysical in the sense of supernatural or transcendent, which is recognized in the Oxford English Dictionary, and in that sense Darwinian naturalism is not metaphysical.
Actually, I have argued that while Darwinian science, like all natural science, requires a methodological naturalism that allows for the possibility of a metaphysical theism, it does not require a metaphysical naturalism that denies metaphysical theism. A methodological naturalism means that we must adopt as a methodological principle that all of our scientific explanations must be grounded in the laws of nature without any appeal to supernatural revelation. But this methodological naturalism leaves open the possibility that as a matter of faith we might move beyond nature to nature's God as the First Cause of nature. This is the basis for those scientists who have embraced theistic evolution or evolutionary creation--the idea that God created the Big Bang and the laws of nature that have allowed the evolutionary unfolding of cosmic history.
In fact, Darwin himself was open to a theistic metaphysics, because as I have indicated in a previous post, he accepted the Thomistic principle of "dual causality" in distinguishing "secondary causes" from "primary causes." While God might by understood by faith as the First Cause of all things, the evolution of species occurred through the "secondary causes" of natural evolutionary laws, and consequently there was no need for God to miraculously intervene in nature to specially create each species. Thus Darwin allowed for the theistic evolution that has been embraced by people like C. S. Lewis, Francis Collins, Deborah Haarsma, and Alvin Plantinga. I have written about this in a previous post.
Darwin concluded--in both the Origin and Descent--that there was no necessary contradiction between his theory and religious belief. In the concluding chapter of the Origin, he declared: "I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of any one." He quoted a remark by the Reverend Charles Kingsley: "it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws."
His famous last sentence of the book evoked the image of the Creator as First Cause, borrowing language that echoes the Biblical book of Genesis: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved."
This opens the possibility of a theistic evolution for those who seek a reconciliation of religious belief and evolutionary science.
At some times in his life, Darwin identified himself as a theist. At other times, particularly in his later years, he identified himself as a skeptic or agnostic. But he always insisted that he was not an atheist. In any case, he never believed that the Genesis story of Creation in six days was to be taken literally. I have written about some of this here and here.
Nevertheless, the critical point for my argument is that Darwin could explain the evolution of morality and social order as a purely natural process. He recognized that while religious belief was often important in the cultural evolution of morality, this moral evolution could be understood as a matter of natural law without any necessary appeal to a supernatural revelation.
Wiley, Price, and Sunshine repeatedly say that this naturalistic explanation of moral evolution must fail because nature isn't self-explanatory without God. Nature must have its transcendent source in God. Ultimately, we must ask: Why is there anything at all? The only possible answer, they say, is God. But then, of course, we must ask: Why is there a God? And why is He the way he is?
Here we face the problem of ultimate explanation: all explanation depends on some ultimate reality that is unexplained. All explanation presupposes the observable order of the world as the final ground of explanation that cannot itself be explained. To the question of why nature has the kind of order that it has, the only reasonable answer is that we must accept this as a brute fact of our experience. That's just the way it is.
Why is there something rather than nothing? Well, why not?
There is nothing in our experience of the world that would make it likely, or even comprehensible, that something would have the power to create everything in the world out of nothing. Indeed, we cannot even understand absolute nothingness, because we have no experience of absolute nothingness. Therefore, if we are reasoning from our ordinary experience of the world, the existence of an omnipotent God who created everything out of nothing is highly improbable or even incomprehensible.
If we appeal to the existence of God as the ultimate cause of nature's order, we still cannot explain the ultimate cause of God. Burke pointed to this problem in speaking of the futility of looking for the "ultimate cause." It might seem very unlikely that a universe would exist uncaused, but it is just as unlikely that God would exist uncaused. Since we have never directly observed God creating everything out of nothing, but every day we observe the causal regularities of nature, the existence of an uncaused nature is to the skeptical thinker far more probable than the existence of an uncaused God.
As Darwin said, "the mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us." Metaphysical conservatives like Wiley, Price, and Sunshine say the mystery is solved by believing in God as the Creator ex nihilo. But that commits the fallacy of explaining a great mystery with an even greater mystery.
Moreover, it should be noted that the Bible never says that God created everything ex nihilo. That "out of nothing" doctrine was imposed by some Christian theologians. But the first two chapters of Genesis suggest that the Creator was working on some preexisting formless matter, which is not nothing!
Consequently, in our search for ultimate explanations, we must appeal either to nature (if we're a skeptic) or to God (if we're a believer) as the unexplained ground of all explanation. Thus does the natural desire to understand lead us to this most fundamental of choices--nature or God, reason or revelation.
Darwin was a Socratic scientific philosopher who chose reason over revelation, but with the understanding that reason cannot refute revelation.
I have written many posts elaborating these points. Some can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
3. DOES METAPHYSICAL CONSERVATISM INCLINE TOWARDS THEOCRACY?
At this point, we might wonder whether this metaphysical debate makes any difference for our moral and political life. If I am right, it does make a difference, because metaphysical conservatism inclines towards theocracy. Wiley, Price, and Sunshine object to this by saying that a theocratic (or God-centered) metaphysics does not necessarily dictate a theocratic politics. "We're all in a theocratic reality," Price asserts. But this need not dictate theocratic politics, Sunshine says, if we see that God is interested in human liberty.
In my article, I pointed to some examples of metaphysical conservatives who support theocracy. I noted that the Intercollegiate Review had published an article by Remi Brague with the title "Are Non-Theocratic Regimes Possible?" His answer to the question was "No." He argued that moral and political order is impossible without the theocratic appeal to the law of God as the metaphysical standard for all human action.
I also noted Dinesh D'Sousa's book The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, in which he tried to persuade American conservatives that "conservatives must move closer to the traditional Muslims." Traditional Muslims believe that America's liberal morality will destroy their religion and their way of life. American conservatives, D'Souza insisted, should admit that the Muslims are right. America really is morally corrupt. American conservatives should join with fundamentalist Muslims in fighting against secular morality and fighting for theocratic morality.
Wiley, Price, and Sunshine are silent about D'Sousa's book. But Wiley asserts that I have distorted Brague, because what he calls theocracy does not mean theocratic politics. After all, Wiley observes, some conservatives like Doug Wilson have argued for "theocratic libertarianism."
This is a confusing use of the word "theocracy" that departs from the root meaning of the word. The English word "theocracy" is a translation of the Greek word theocratia that was coined by Josephus as a term for ancient Israel as ruled by the Mosaic laws. The Oxford English Dictionary defines "theocracy" as
"A form of government in which God (or a deity) is recognized as the king or immediate ruler, and his laws are taken as the statute-book of the kingdom, these laws being usually administered by a priestly order as his ministers and agents; hence (loosely) a system of government by a sacerdotal order, claiming a divine commission; also, a state so governed: esp. applied to the commonwealth of Israel from the exodus to the election of Saul as king."
This doesn't look like libertarianism to me. On the contrary, it looks more like the theocratic regime sought by conservative Catholic integralists who argue that politics must order the lives of citizens to direct them to the eternal salvation of their souls, and for this the temporal power of government must be subordinated to the spiritual power of the Church. Some integralists point to the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX in medieval France as their model. This is a Christian version of Israel under the Mosaic law or of Plato's theocratic city in the Laws.
This suggests to me that deciding whether a G0d-centered metaphysics requires a theocratic political regime will depend upon whether one is looking to the God of the Old Testament or the God of the New Testament. As I have indicated in a previous post, Roger Williams was expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for denouncing the Puritan rule there as a theocracy enforcing Mosaic law that was contrary to the New Testament, where the Christian churches were voluntary associations that did not persecute heretics or unbelievers. In Rhode Island, he established a political order that tolerated all religions and even atheists. This showed how God-centered Christians could reject the theocratic God of the Old Testament and embrace the Lockean liberal principles of toleration and religious liberty suggested in the New Testament. One can see this, for example, in the Christian Lockean liberalism of C. S. Lewis.
4. IMMANENT TELEOLOGY VERSUS COSMIC TELEOLOGY
In a Lockean liberal society with religious liberty, where people will not be persecuted for heresy, blasphemy, or atheism, some people will be guided by a religiously-informed cosmic teleology, while others will be guided by the immanent teleology that is part of our evolved human nature. Wiley, Price, and Sunshine say that evolutionary science cannot support any teleology. Price says that I illicitly import formal and final causes into my reasoning. But they assert this without responding to my argument that while the evolutionary explanation of morality cannot appeal to the cosmic teleology of the metaphysical conservatives, the evolutionary explanation does recognize the immanent teleology of living beings.
Cosmic teleology is the metaphysical conception of all of nature as an organic whole in which all beings serve a cosmic purpose set by an intelligent designer or Creator. By contrast, the immanent teleology of organic life is manifest in the goal-directed generation, structure, and activity of individual organisms. Even if evolution by natural selection is not purposeful, it produces organic beings that are purposeful. Plants and animals grow to maturity, and once grown, they act for ends set by the functional nature of the species. Human beings act to satisfy the natural desires of their evolved human nature.
Darwin recognized the teleological character of his evolutionary science. In an article in Nature, Asa Gray wrote: "let us recognize Darwin's great service to Natural Science in bringing back to it Teleology; so that instead of Morphology versus Teleology, we shall have Morphology wedded to Teleology." In response to this, Darwin wrote to Gray (June 5, 1874): "What you say about Teleology pleases me especially and I do not think anyone else has ever noted that." When Darwin read some of Aristotle's biological works, he saw that he and Aristotle were in agreement about biological teleology. I have written about this.
5. DID DARWIN NATURALIZE GENOCIDE?
If Darwin has a teleology, Sunshine suggests, it must be an immoral teleology of survival of the fittest leading to genocide. This must be so because Darwinian evolution is driven by competition within the species. He quotes this passage from Darwin's Descent of Man: "At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races" (1871, I:201; 2004 [Penguin ed.], 183).
When Sunshine says that evolution is all about competition within the species, he ignores Darwin's insistence that the evolution of human morality arises from human sociability and sympathy (Descent of Man, I:70-106; 2004, 120-151). It is true, however, that Darwin recognized tribal conflict and group selection: "It is no argument against savage man being a social animal, that the tribes inhabiting adjacent districts are almost always at war with each other; for the social instincts never extend to all the individuals of the same species" (I.85; 2004, 132). Darwin thought that one of the "chief causes of the low morality of savages" was "the confinement of sympathy to the same tribe" (I.97; 2004, 143).
Nevertheless, Darwin looked forward to the cultural evolution of morality towards a universal humanitarian sympathy: "As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races" (I:100-101; 2004, 147).
This cultural evolution of morality allows us to recognize the immorality of tribal warfare, such as that endorsed by the Old Testament. Moses said that Yahweh told him to wage holy war in which the captured enemy towns would be put under a "curse of destruction," so that "thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth" (Deuteronomy 20:10-18). So in the holy war against the Midianites, the soldiers of Israel killed all of the adult men, but they saved the women and children as captives. When Moses saw this, he was enraged. He ordered them: "So kill all the male children and kill all the women who have ever slept with a man; but spare the lives of the young girls who have never slept with a man, and keep them for yourselves" (Numbers 31:7-20). Our evolved moral sense allows us to see the evil in such tribal brutality.
But then what should we say about the passage quoted by Sunshine, where Darwin speaks of the "civilized races" exterminating the "savage races"? We should notice, first of all, that unlike Moses Darwin did not sanctify this as commanded by God. We should also notice that Darwin was reporting what he had observed during his trip around the world on the Beagle, and that he recognized the evil in such tribal cruelty. As I have noted in a post on this, Darwin condemned the Europeans who were exterminating the indigenous people of South America, Australia, and New Zealand. Even if the Europeans were "a little superior in civilization" and superior in military power, Darwin observed, they were "inferior in every moral virtue."
Thus did Darwin show how an evolved moral sense could support his moral condemnation of European tribal brutality.
6. WAS NIETZSCHE RIGHT ABOUT THE CHRISTIAN BASIS OF ALL MORALITY?
And yet Wiley, Price, and Sunshine say that Darwin failed to see that his morality was derived not from natural human evolution but from his Christian culture. Although Darwin was not a Christian, he still held onto a Christian morality. Even if he thought he was an atheist, he was a Christian in his moral practice. Because if he had really been an atheist, who believed that there was no God to institute moral law by divine command, then he would have believed that "If God is dead, everything is permitted," and he would have become a murderous psychopath like Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov. Wiley, Price, and Sunshine talk a lot about this point when they say that atheists like Richard Dawkins and Jurgen Habermas are actually "Christian atheists" insofar as they show the cultural influence of Christian morality.
Wiley, Price, and Sunshine have picked up this idea from some remarks by Friedrich Nietzsche and Jordan Peterson's interpretation of those remarks. They are very enamored of Peterson, and they say they want to have him appear in a Theology Pugcast podcast.
I have criticized this Nietzsche/Peterson/Dostoevsky idea that morality is impossible without the Christian belief in morality as created by Divine Command. Some of my posts on this can be found here, here, and here. On a related point, I have argued that the modern idea of universal human rights can be grounded in Darwinian biology without any need for religious beliefs (look here, here, and here).
In these posts, I have argued that Peterson's reasoning is silly. The only reason we don't commit murder is because we believe that God commands us not to murder. So if we believed that God was dead, we would commit murder. Therefore, if we don't commit murder, our actions show that we are not atheists. But then, eventually, as modern atheism becomes such a deeply felt belief that it becomes expressed in our actions--once we have consumed God's corpse, and there's nothing more to eat--we should expect that we will all become murderers.
If this were true, we would expect to see empirical historical evidence that religious belief is correlated with a low homicide rate, and declining religious belief is correlated with a high homicide rate. But there is a lot of evidence for declining violence over the past centuries, with some of the steepest declines in the less religious countries.
In fact, even Peterson cites Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature as supporting this conclusion: "The probability that a modern person, in a functional democratic country, will now kill or be killed is infinitesimally low compared to what it was in previous societies (and still is, in the unorganized and anarchic parts of the world)" (58). Oddly, Peterson does not notice how this contradicts his prediction that the modern death of God must necessarily turn us all into murderous Raskolnikovs.
It's surprising to me that in all the commentary on Peterson that I have read, no one has pointed out this fundamental contradiction in his arguments.
Moreover, Peterson ignores all the problems with his Divine Command Theory of morality. For example, what should a father do if God commands him to murder his son (Genesis 22)? Is murder the right thing to do when God commands it? Amazingly, even Thomas Aquinas says that murder is right if God commands it (ST, II-II, q. 64, a. 6, ad 1). Would Wiley, Price, and Sunshine agree with this?
7. DOES DARWIN REDUCE ALL HUMAN DESIRES TO SURVIVAL AND REPRODUCTION?
But having argued that a naturally evolved moral sense is a more reliable guide to morality than Divine Command, I know that Wiley, Price, and Sunshine would object by saying, as Wiley does, that Darwinian morality is crudely reductionist because the only moral ends are survival and reproduction.
Surely, however, survival and reproduction are important moral ends. Whenever Moses has to give a reason for the people of Israel to obey his laws, he says that obeying the law will allow them to live and propagate themselves (Deuteronomy 4:1, 4:40, 5:29, 6:1-3, 24, 8:1, 11:8-9, 20, 22:7, 23:9-14, 25:15, 30:15-20). The natural desires for life and parental care are human universals. Do Wiley, Price, and Sunshine deny this?
Of course, survival and reproduction are only the minimal conditions of morality. I argue that the natural desires for life and parental care are only two of 20 natural desires that constitute the natural standards for moral order. Wiley, Price, and Sunshine are silent about this.
8. PLANTINGA'S EVOLUTIONARY ARGUMENT AGAINST NATURALISM
In all of my responses here to Wiley, Price, and Sunshine, I have assumed the validity of Darwinian evolutionary science in explaining human nature and human morality. But they say that Alvin Plantinga has proven that a purely naturalistic science cannot claim any rational validity unless it accepts a metaphysical theism.
Plantinga argues that the theistic doctrine of the human mind as created by God in His image provides the necessary support for the validity of human thought, including the validity of modern science. If we embrace Naturalism--the view that nothing exists except Nature, and so there is no God or nothing like God--we are caught in self-contradiction: if human thought originated not from a divine Mind but from the irrational causes of Nature, then we cannot trust our minds as reliable, and thus we cannot trust our belief in Naturalism. Naturalism destroys itself by destroying the rationality of believing in Naturalism, or anything else. Insofar as science--including evolutionary science--depends on the validity of human thought, and insofar as theism is the indispensable support for trusting in the validity of human thought, science is not only compatible with theism, science depends upon theism.
Remarkably, however, Wiley, Price, and Sunshine invoke Plantinga's argument without even mentioning, much less answering, the powerful criticisms of that argument. It's as though they think they need not concern themselves with the criticisms, because Plantinga agrees with them, and therefore he must be right.
The weak link in Plantinga's argument for metaphysical naturalism as self-defeating is his assumption that adaptive behavior is completely unrelated to true belief. The evidence of evolutionary history suggests that evolution produces cognitive faculties that are reliable but fallible. The mental abilities of animals, including human beings, are fallible because evolution produces adaptations that are good enough but not perfect, and this results in the mental fallibility that is familiar to us.
But despite this fallibility, the mental faculties cannot be absolutely unreliable. Even Plantinga concedes (in his debate with Daniel Dennett) that in the evolution of animals, "adaptive behavior requires accurate indicators." So, for example, a frog must have sensory equipment that allows him to accurately detect flies so that he can catch them with his tongue. Similarly, the immune system of the human body must accurately indicate the presence of foreign bodies and then accurately devise responses to destroy the invaders. But then Plantinga argues that these accurate indicators don't require true beliefs. It's not clear that the frog has any beliefs. And the human being is probably not even aware of what the immune system is doing exactly.
What this shows, of course, is that much of an animal's adaptive behavior through mental activity does not require conscious reasoning at all. But for those animals who do develop some capacity for conscious reasoning--and most preeminently human beings--the accuracy of this conscious reasoning will be important for adaptation. The highest mental capacities of human beings are so biologically expensive in terms of the investment of energy they consume that it is implausible that evolution would have produced them unless they improved the ability of human beings to track the truth about themselves and their environment. Again, this is going to be fallible, but it's implausible that human beings could be naturally evolved for being in a state of complete and perpetual delusion.
And yet that's exactly what Plantinga asks us to imagine--that we could have been naturally evolved for a state of complete and perpetual delusion. Having taken this step of absurd Cartesian skepticism, he then tells us that the only escape from such skepticism is to assume that God would never allow this to happen. But as always is the case for the Cartesian skeptic, this all depends on imagining scenarios that are utterly implausible and unsupported by even a shred of evidence.
Only those who find Cartesian skepticism plausible will find Plantinga's argument plausible. Indeed, Plantinga's argument originated with Descartes.
For example, consider this possibility for human evolution suggested by Plantinga:
So suppose Paul is a prehistoric hominid; a hungry tiger approaches. Fleeing is perhaps the most appropriate behavior: . . . this behavior could be produced by a large number of different belief-desire pairs. . . .
Perhaps Paul very much likes the idea of being eaten, but when he sees a tiger, always runs off looking for a better prospect, because he thinks it unlikely that the tiger he sees will eat him. This will get his body parts in the right place so far as survival is concerned, without involving much by way of true belief. . . . Or perhaps he thinks the tiger is a large, friendly, cuddly pussycat and wants to pet it, but he also believes that the best way to pet it is to run away from it. . . . or perhaps he thinks the tiger is a regularly recurring illusion, and, hoping to keep his weight down, has formed the resolution to run a mile at top speed whenever presented with such an illusion; or perhaps he thinks he is about to take part in a sixteen-hundred-meter race, wants to win, and believes the appearance of the tiger is the starting signal; or perhaps . . . . Clearly there are any number of belief-cum-desire systems that equally fit a given bit of behavior.
Sunshine quotes from this passage about Paul the prehistoric hominid as an example of Plantinga's profound insight.
Well, yes, these weird stories are all logically possible, as modern philosophers like to say. But they are also utterly implausible, because there is no evidence that anything like this could have happened in human evolution. Plantinga's claim that there is no clear connection between adaptive behavior and true beliefs in evolutionary history depends on fantasies of his imagination unsupported by evidence. He has to do that, because if he actually looked at the evidence of human evolutionary history bearing upon the emergence of human mental faculties, he would be faced with evidence for the evolution of human cognitive capacities for exploring the world that are generally reliable, even if fallible.
He would also see evidence that human beings can use their fallible mental capacities to correct their mistakes. After all, the very capacity to recognize our fallibility presupposes our skill for reliable reasoning about ourselves and our world. There are good reasons to believe that this can be explained as an outcome of a natural evolutionary process in which divine intervention was not necessary.
I have written about Plantinga's argument here, here, here, and here.
9. SLAVERY, THE BIBLE, AND THE EVOLVED MORAL SENSE
One example of our evolved ability to use our fallible mental capacities to correct our moral mistakes is our ability to see that while slavery has been practiced for thousands of years, it has always been "a great crime," as Darwin called it (2004, 141-42). And here using our evolved moral sense to correct our mistakes includes correcting the Bible's endorsement of slavery.
I developed this argument in the last section of my Intercollegiate Review article. Remarkably, however, Wiley began the Theology Pugcast podcast by saying that they would ignore this section of the article. He offered no explanation for this except to say that I had "an ax to grind" in this section.
In this section of the article, I claimed that the contrast between metaphysical conservatism and evolutionary conservatism was illustrated in how they differ in their understanding of the moral debate over slavery. Darwinian conservatism can recognize the immorality of slavery as contrary to our evolved moral sense. Against this, my critics have argued that any moral condemnation of slavery must ultimately rest upon a religious metaphysics that sees slavery as contrary to God's law.
Hume, Smith, and Darwin saw slavery as a violation of the moral sentiments--particularly, those sentiments that enforce justice as reciprocity. Slavery is a form of social parasitism, as can be seen in slavery among ants. And since human slaves are not naturally adapted to their enslavement, they will resist their exploitation; and slaveholders will have to impose their rule over their slaves by force and fraud. In the effort to justify slavery, slaveholders will espouse a fraudulent ideology of paternalism that claims that the slaves are naturally benefited by their enslavement. Proslavery ideology in the American South asserted that black slaves were physically, morally, and intellectually inferior to whites in their biological nature, and so these black slaves were happier when they were enslaved to white masters. One of the primary motivations for Darwin's writing of The Descent of Man was to refute this ideology of scientific racism by showing that all of the human races were members of the same human species with the same moral sense that condemned slavery as parasitic exploitation.
The critics of Darwinian conservatism have insisted, however, that a Darwinian account of morality cannot sustain a moral case against slavery, which requires a universal morality based upon the cosmic moral law of a religious metaphysics as taught by the Bible. The problem with this reasoning is that the Bible supports slavery.
Metaphysical conservatives like Richard Weaver have admired the "older religiousness" in the American South before the Civil War, and they have recognized that part of the Southern religion was faith in the Bible as supporting slavery. According to Weaver, slavery "is well recognized in the Old Testament, and it is not without endorsement in the New; indeed, a strict constructionism interpretation almost requires its defense." Similarly, historian Mark Malvasi (writing in the conservative journal Modern Age) has seen the American South as the last bastion of the "Old Republic," which was founded on "a genuinely Christian slavery."
Malvasi identified the Reverend Frederick Ross's Slavery Ordained of God, published in 1857, as one of the best statements of the biblical justification for slavery. Ross adhered to a divine command theory of morality. Ross insisted that to look to natural standards of right and wrong independently of God's will was atheism. (He condemned the "self-evident truths" of the Declaration of Independence as an expression of Thomas Jefferson's atheism.) We know what is right and wrong only because, and to the extent that, we know whether God has declared it right or wrong. And for this, we must turn to the Bible as God's revelation of His will. Therefore, we cannot know whether slavery is right or wrong except by seeing what the Bible teaches about God's will as to slavery.
Ross noted that the Old Testament clearly endorsed slavery. The ancient Israelites practiced it, and God commanded it. Similarly, in the New Testament, the Christians accepted slavery as practiced by the ancient Romans. Paul taught slaves to obey their masters, just as he taught children to obey their parents and wives to obey their husbands.
The dispute over the Bible's handling of the slavery issue divided the Christian churches in America before and during the Civil War. Americans had looked to the Bible as the revelation of the sacred order of the universe that would resolve all moral disputes by the cosmic authority of God's law. But in this greatest moral crisis in American history, the Bible failed to provide any clear answer in the dispute over slavery between North and South. As Abraham Lincoln observed in his Second Inaugural Address, "Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other."
In such a situation, human beings must appeal to some natural moral sense like that espoused by Hume, Smith, and Darwin. Darwinian conservatives can explain this moral sense as rooted in evolved human nature and as shaped by moral sentiments, moral traditions, and practical judgments. Unlike the metaphysical conservatives, who claim that all social order must conform to some supernatural order of intelligent design or divine creation, evolutionary conservatives see social order as the product of ordinary human experience as guided by nature, custom, and prudence.
That's why conservatives need Charles Darwin.
I have written about the debate over slavery and the Bible here and here.
I have invited Wiley, Price, and Sunshine to write a response to this post. If they do so, I will be happy to post it here.
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