SPEAKER_07

Hello and thank you so much for downloading this episode of the Speak Life Podcast. My name is Thomas Thoroughgood, media producer at Speak Life. And today on the podcast, you will hear a conversation that Glenn Scrivener had with Joe Foley on the question of can we be good without God? Can we have a grounding for morality aside from belief in God? And in particular, can we have a grounding for some of the very particular moral views that we have, aside from the God who is revealed in Jesus? Joe Foley runs a YouTube channel called Unsolicited Advice with around half a million subscribers. And he gets into philosophical questions from an atheist agnostic perspective. This conversation was hosted by the Philippa Foote Philosophy and Theology Society at Camford School. It happened on Friday, the 10th of January. And it was set up kind of as a debate with opening statements and then discussion between Glenn and Joe. But it's a very cordial conversation. It is a live event from quite a big, echoey school building, so the audio isn't the clearest. We've done our best to try and clear it up a little bit so it's a bit clearer. But yes, a huge thank you to the school for allowing us to share this. And I hope you enjoy. Over to Glenn and Joe.

SPEAKER_08

Okay, we've been we've been filling this out. We've been filling this out and had a go at the quotes. Um I'll read you out another quote and see if you can guess who said this. If you know it, say it low, it'll be like karaoke. We hold these truths to be self-evidence that all men are created equal and have been endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Who knows who said that? Jesus. It's all based on him. That's the conclusion. Jefferson, we've got Jefferson, Phil Jack. Ten points in control around two. Okay. Thomas Jefferson said all of that apart from one word. So this is the Declaration of Independence, 4th of July 1776, the founding of the American Republic. And in June, Thomas Jefferson sends out a draft to all the prospective signatories, and he wants some of their feedback. And one of the people he sends it to is Benjamin Franklin. And Franklin doesn't make many suggestions, but he does make one momentous suggestion. He crosses out two words that Thomas Jefferson originally had in the Declaration of Independence. Originally, the Declaration said, we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable, that all men are created equal. We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable. And Benjamin Franklin thought, no, let's not found the Republic on something as contested as religious truth. Let's found the Republic on self-evident reason. And so he crossed out sacred and undeniable, and he just wrote self-evident. And Thomas Jefferson thought that was a great idea, and that's now what is in the Declaration of Independence. Do you see the difference between founding the Republic on sacred and undeniable truths versus founding the Republic on reason? What is self-evident? And you can understand Benjamin Franklin's objection. Perhaps a sacred truth is something that's too contested, really, to found a republic. Perhaps what we need is reason to found our republic. And wouldn't it be nice if human equality was self-evident? Well, then we are off to the races with our American Republic, and away we go. I think one of the problems, though, with Benjamin Franklin suggesting that, is that if there's one thing that's self-evident about human equality, it's that it is not self-evident, is it? When you think about it, take any two people and judge them by any one metric, and what are you going to discover? You're going to discover that this person is richer than that person, this person is stronger than that person, this person is perhaps a man, this person is perhaps a woman, this person might be high IQ, this person might be low IQ, this person might be a barbarian, this person might be a citizen, right? When you judge any two people by any one metric, you're going to discover the differences between those people. Where does their equality lie? If you spoke to an ancient philosopher and you asked, you asked an aristocrat, let's say. Like, in what sense are two people equal? If one is a barbarian and one is a citizen, if one is a slave master and one is a slave, in what sense are they equal? How? How are we even using this idea? I put it to you that the last thing that is self-evident about human beings is our moral equality. And yet we all tend to believe it in this room. I think that's the sort of moral intuition that we all tend to share. It's the sort of thing that if you don't believe in the moral equality of each person, no matter rich or poor, uh, no matter man or woman, no matter strong or weak, if you don't believe in that, you get kicked off Facebook pretty quickly, right? It's a blasphemy to not believe in equality. And yet to try and discern this simply scientifically, I think is a fool's errand. Nevertheless, uh, we have the founding of the American Republic on this apparently self-evident truth. And I think you can kind of go with Benjamin Franklin, you can kind of go with Thomas Jefferson if you put all the emphasis on the we. We hold these truths to be self-evident. Billions wouldn't. But we do. Let us down the republic on this kind of morality. But I put it to you that that kind of morality is not self-evident, uh, not at all, in fact. Uh what do you call uh a graduate of Canford School? Are they an old Canfordian? Okay. So as one old Canfordian uh has said, Tom Holland, the historian, not the not the slight man, Tom Holland, the cool Tom Holland, the podcaster we produced his history podcast, uh, he writes in his wonderful book, Dominion, in 2019. He says that all men have been created equal and endowed with an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but not remotely self-evident truths, that most Americans believe they were, owed less to philosophy than to the Bible, to the assurance given equally to Christians and Jews, to Protestants and Catholics, to Calvinists and Quakers, that every human being was created in God's image. The truest and ultimate seabed of the American Republic, no matter what some of those who had composed its founding documents, might have cared to think, Benjamin Franklin, the founding was from the book of Genesis. So what Tom Holland is saying there is moral intuitions, perhaps ones that seem so basic to us, so fundamental, are not as self-evident as you might have imagined. And that historically we did not come to these intuitions via reason. And I would go further than Tom Holland, and I would say I don't think you can get to these intuitions purely via reason. In conversation with Tom in 2019, I asked him about kind of secular humanism as a coherent philosophy. I'm often saying, you know, secular humanist pick one. Pick one. Because I think the humanist ideals that we have inherited have a distinct genealogy to them, an intellectual genealogy that traces back to scripture, traces back to the person of Jesus. So we were having that kind of conversation, Tom and I, back in 2019. And I said to him, Tom, what do you say to my humanist friends who believe that even without Jesus Christ, we would have got to human equality, we would have got to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights anyway. And he he was very interesting. He said, Well, that's a very theological point of view. It is to imagine that human rights are hanging there in the ether waiting to be discovered. And he said, if you think that human rights are hanging in the ether waiting to be discovered, that's as theological an idea as believing that the Lord Jesus Christ rose from the dead and is seated at the right hand of the Father. And I think Tom Holland says that because a belief in human rights and a belief in Jesus, they're kind of twins of one another. Because when you think about it, you could not have a stronger, firmer foundation for humanism than God the human. How could you have a more transcendent vision for the human than the fact that our Maker took flesh and has participated in our humanity? And Tom Holland is pointing us to the fact that this the Christian story, whether you believe it or not, the Christian story is that God the Son became God our brother, took on our sin on the cross, and rose again to the right hand of the Father to that place of judgment. Therefore, no wonder we have such an exalted view of the human. No wonder we think in terms of things like crimes against humanity. Have you ever thought to delve into the coherence, the logical coherence of crimes against humanity? You know, if if one human wrongs another human, well, the human is the perpetrator, the human is the victim, and apparently they've committed a crime against humanity that's up here. Humanity is the judge, humanity is the perpetrator, humanity is the victim. This case would get thrown out of court, wouldn't it, pretty quickly. I don't think many of the ways we think of humanistic morality, and Joe and I will have a conversation about what kind of morality is possible post-Christianity. But I think in terms of humanism, the chief, and I would submit the only true grounding for a proper humanism is actually Jesus Christ, God the human. So where does this leave us for tonight's subject? Uh, can we be good without God? Is that the subject? It's always good to ask that question at the end of your talk, isn't it? Uh can we be good without God? Um I guess I want to question the question. Um I think all of us have a God in the sense of all of us have some kind of transcendent ideal. You might think that the transcendent ideal is the universe itself, you might think that laws of nature are ultimate, you might think the Tao is ultimate, you might think Allah is ultimate, you might think fate is ultimate, you might think Jesus is ultimate.

SPEAKER_02

I'm in that gap.

SPEAKER_08

But I think I think we've all got some conception of God that then leads into a conception of the good, and therefore the good life, and therefore what morality looks like. And these two ideas, God and the good, are mutually informing. You don't have to believe in Jesus in order to be good. In fact, this weekend you might come across a homeless person and act in a Christian way that so outshines my meager Christian faith. You might take them to KFC and find out all about their life and be a real help and a blessing to that person. You might be Jesus to that person and be an atheist yourself. Of course, you can be a very good person. But the question is: into what metaphysic does your morality fit? And I submit to you that the sort of humanistic morals, the sort of morals in which you take it for granted that all people are equal, that there are such things as human rights, that a society should be judged by the way it treats its weakest members, that there's such a thing as progress, that there's such a thing as human rights. I think if you believe those sorts of things, you're already, whether you know it or not, inhabiting a quite Christian-ish metaphysic. And what I would do as a Christian clergyman at that stage is to ask you just to pull at the threads of those moral beliefs, because I think you would find the kind of God that I believe in at the end of them. I'm sure we can unpack that more in QA. But that'll do for now. Thanks so much.

SPEAKER_01

Right.

SPEAKER_05

Thanks so much. That was an absolutely wonderful speech, and I look forward to discussing it further.

SPEAKER_09

Hello everyone.

SPEAKER_05

First of all, thank you very much for inviting me. It's lovely, but it's an absolutely beautiful school and wonderful hall. Um so, yeah, it's just lovely to soak up the aesthetic. I particularly appreciate the question before us. Can we be good without God? I like it because fundamentally, anyone, theist or atheist, could take either side of the debate. You could be a theist who thinks that, despite God's existence, it would be possible for there to be morality without him there. This was a reasonably popular position in the mid-17th century for a while, which is always very good fun. It would also, you might also be an atheist who thinks that if God exists, there is no goodness, but then simply bite this bullet. Famously, Richard Dawkins took up this position. So, whatever your beliefs about God in the specific realm, I really would encourage you to open your mind to the possible positions on play in. Your faith or lack thereof is not actually under threat tonight. This question is a little bit like an ogre. It has many layers, and some of them are fleshy, and there is a foundational skeleton at its core. At one level, we can approach it sociologically. We can ask questions like: are atheists, as a matter of fact, less pro-social in their behavior than the religious? Can societies consisting mostly or majorly of non-believers all cohere around a set of shared principles? We can also approach it psychologically. Can we explain our intuitions about fairness, justice, and goodness in a linear causal fashion? They clearly do exist in most of us without recourse to a deity. Is it possible for somebody to disbelieve in God and yet not also think, as Ivan Karamasov did, that everything is now permitted? These, as I said, are linear questions. They concern causal factors on human behavior. But finally, we can approach it philosophically or foundationally. Can there be moral truths without a conscious, personal God who creates and maintains them? Is there such a thing as a moral fact in an atheist universe? Can I turn to a murderer and say that what they have done is not just harmful, not just revolting, but wrong in some definite sense? Can I do that without admitting that there is a God? Each of these questions is separate and each demands its own treatment. You could, for instance, argue that psychologically, moral intuitions are explained by a mixture of natural selection and our evolved ability to override some of our baser instincts with cultural factors, as many anthropologists have observed. You could say that most societies are likely to converge on at least a few basic rules, like don't murder and don't steal, because these are the sorts of rules that ensure societies survive. Though I hasten to point out, as I'm sure Glenn would, that the messy business of universability rears its head here. You could believe all of these causal claims and still think that without God, there is no such thing as a true moral statement. Without God, there is no way to say that murder is wrong is true. It is partly the interplay between these levels of question that I'm interested in exploring with my wonderful interlocutor. Out of all of these levels, the one that tends to prove the most contentious is the philosophical or foundational one. There is something immensely comforting and neat about being able to say, I know that this is wrong, because the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good creator of the universe has decreed it wrong. It provides an outside force separate from any individual human that can settle moral conflicts. More importantly, it provides a truth maker for moral statements. An action is good if it coheres with the will of God, and it is bad if it does not, and very bad if it actually outright contradicts it. Many theists have claimed that there is no way to ground moral truths without the existence of a deity. Or, to put it simply, the claim is that moral realism implies the existence of God. If moral facts exist, then God necessarily follows from that. From here, there are a number of ways that we could proceed with our discussion, so get ready to explore a few ideas. The most natural way is to provide potential counterexamples. If there are tenable models of moral realism without God, then the conditional is broken. The claim that we cannot have goodness without God is far stronger than the claim that God in fact grounds morality. It amounts to saying that there is no coherent atheistic moral position, or for the more mathematically minded in the audience, no countermodel. Cannot is just a very high bar to jump over. On the face of it, this will present some difficulties, because there are many philosophers throughout history who have not grounded morality in a god, but nonetheless have at least presented as having objective moral truths, or real moral truths, to use a slightly more uh slightly more basic not basic in the sense of um not basic in the sense of sort of dumbing it down, basic in the sense of objective is quite a specific thing. What there are some that you'll probably have heard of, ones like utilitarianism, that claims that what is good is what creates the greatest good for the greatest number of people. We've also heard a little bit about humanism, which normally grounds moral truths in some collection of facts about human well-being. And I'm sure that we can sit down and talk about that for the next hour. But I'm also sure that many of you have heard that discussion play out many times before. But I think we severely underestimate the number of philosophies that have grounded morality in something other than a date. And I think this often goes overlooked in discussions like this. Take Plato, for example. Like many ancient Greeks, he did believe in gods, but he did not think these gods grounded morality. He rather appealed to a non-conscious metaphysical object he called the form of the good. He thought that if we reflected on our everyday moral intuitions enough, we would be able to abstract a set of principles that govern them. In a similar way that C.S. Lewis described in his book Mere Christianity. However, rather than inferring a god, Plato inferred a set of moral facts, standing apart from every single human agent, exemplified in this form of the good. Philosophical models like these interrupt a key inference that the classic moral argument makes, that in order for there to be moral facts, there must be a theistic mind who decided those facts. When I make an observation like my desk at home is wooden, I don't appeal to the existence of a mind, but rather the existence of my wooden desk. Plato doesn't appeal to the mind of God to ground moral facts, but a non-conscious, immaterial object. This implies that there is no necessary connection between the existence of moral truths and the existence of God. It is a counterpart. Remember, you can consent to this even if you are a theist, and even if you're a theist who believes that, as a matter of fact, God does ground moral truths in this world. The point is, it is logically possible that there are moral truths and not God. There is no contradiction in asserting moral realism and yet being an atheist. Outside of this really quite particular slice of history, atheism and materialism are in no way equivalent. We can also take some other positions. The Kantian philosopher Christine Causgaard defines a sort of human-based morality. She argues we all implicitly value the concept of agential human-reflective desires as a precondition for any sort of action. And so we're already implicitly valuing the desires and agency of others because we're valuing desires and agency as a whole. She claims we are committed to this through our acts, whatever metaphysics we claim to have. Thus, there are ways of acting which are consistent with this prior commitment and ways which are not. This is her way of defining goodness and badness. This is also a system with a definition of goodness and a way of verifying whether something falls under it, but Christine Corsga does not invoke a god. She also later develops the scheme to include animals as well as humans, but I don't want to go into that too much now. To use yet another model, in early Theravada Buddhism, there are no gods. Although I hasten to add that there are gods in other sets of Buddhism. I don't want to kind of boil down thousands of years of religious and philosophical history into a sentence. But what is good is equated with compassion for the universal suffering humanity is laden with and the behavior that will bring you closer to enlightenment. As it happens, these often cohere, but they're not completely equivalent. On the Eightfold Path, right thinking, right doing, and so on are called right because they point towards these things. This is how statements of goodness and evil are grounded. And once again, God is not inherently required to make this picture function. The overarching stories that motivate people to be kind to one another is that they all live in the same boat facing the sufferings of the world, striving to achieve enlightenment, which is explicitly open to all. This broader principle is then supplemented with various different compelling narratives about everyone being dear to themselves in order to motivate empathy and a sort of universal compassion, in much the same way as the central Christian principles of loving thy neighbour, and I hasten to add, thine enemy, are supplemented by illustrative parables and compelling narratives to make them motivated. I add thine enemy just because I think that we rarely do, but I think it's the most sort of fascinating and original part of the Christ-like teaching there. Now, at this point, I can almost feel an objection dancing around the room. In each of these cases, something is postulated that is just good as a first principle. If you were to ask Plato what the form of the good was, he would probably just stare at you blankly and not just because he didn't speak English. If the Buddha was asked why it is desirable to achieve enlightenment and free yourself from samsala, he would have to concede that those things just are good. They just are desirable. And it's true, we will have to do this. You cannot get an ought from an is. At some point, you have to postulate a first principle that is just good. But I hasten to add, this is also what any metaphysical grounding of goodness in God will also have to do. If I ask why is God good, that is, what is it about God that makes him good, the deity must do one of two things. They must either appeal to some descriptive fact about him or his nature that makes him good, he is all-loving, all generous, more kind, and so on, or they would have to say that God just is good, either by will, or as a clinist in his more sophisticated way for it, by nature. The trouble with the first path is that it kicks the can down the road. Then it is not God that defines goodness, but one of these other properties. The issue with the second path is not some kind of gotcha. It's not that I think that the eutrophone element somehow destroys religious morality or anything like that. It's just that we find that grounding goodness in God eventually comes up against the same problem as grounding goodness in anything else. In the final maneuver, we must sit back and declare that something just is good. Again, my point is not that this is doing something silly or that it is at all philosophically unsophisticated, because I don't think it's either of those things. I think that it is exactly the same thing that any attempt to ground objective morality must do. God can ground goodness, but I would argue he can only ground goodness in the same way that Plato or the Buddha could. And I look forward to exploring some of the critiques of this argument and also some of the nuances of this in the discussion later. I hope I've demonstrated just a couple of things in this brief opening. The first is whether we can be good without God is a multi-layered question. The second is that goodness without God is not a new idea. We find this in non-theistic morality in some of the earliest recorded philosophies in history. And the lastly, that eventually any philosophy has to simply declare something good. We cannot have to say that we cannot have moral facts without God, we must demonstrate that each and every proposed non-theistic moral system is not just false, but necessarily false. You can think that God is the best way of grounding morality. You can think that he does, in fact, ground morality in this world. But this is very different to saying he is the only way of grounding morality. Thank you so much for listening, and I look forward to chatting through these ideas in more detail over our discussion.

SPEAKER_10

So, what we're here to discuss in this 15-minute discussion is to really press that conversation further. Is God really required to explain morality? So I think that's where we should begin probing a little bit further. And obviously, Glenn, you've now had a chance to think through some counter-arguments where there are philosophers who have ground-up morality without God. We have utilitarianism. So, do you want to explain a bit further? Why is that not the same as Christianity explaining where morals come from?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08

So let me just affirm that you can be good without God, in the sense that you can perform moral acts in ways that outshine believers in the God that I believe in. But I do think that whatever God you happen to believe in will inform your morality. We happen to live in a culture in which our morality has been formed by a particular God. A God who hung on a cross for his enemies. And I think that is what has granted to us the particular moral intuitions we have. So absolutely we can be we can be moral on any kind of system. And you you might just, through game theory, just come up with a kind of a morality. My point would then be, but that doesn't sound like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at that point. And I think tit for tat is a very good evolutionary strategy. And if you want to call in-group amity and out-group enmity, if you want to call pro-social behavior moral, I've got no qualms with that. But I do think it's it's it's light years away from what Jesus was talking about. Does that help?

SPEAKER_10

So, Joe, to clarify, you are an agnostic, but you're not saying that that doesn't mean there isn't non-physical things that exist. But I think from Glenn's point, he's saying that Christianity is not comparable to some of these other suggestions. So would you like to push back on that?

SPEAKER_05

I think that to a certain extent, I think you're absolutely right, and they're not comparable in the specifics. My point isn't necessarily that um about the specific declarations of any particular moral system. I'm more talking about the meta-ethical point of establishing moral realism, the existence of moral truths, doesn't depend on the existence of a deity. So I fully agree with you. Like I utilitarianism doesn't get into the declaration of human rights. I mean, famously, Jeremy Bentham has the rights and nonsense on Stilts comment, which is fantastic. Um, well, fantastic in the sense of witty. You might also call it worrying. Um but it's also worth noting that there are um there are philosophies that have uh rights-based formulations without necessarily explicitly appealing to a god. Uh famously, this is most evidence in the Kantian tradition, and Christine Causegard is one example of that. Although I think there are two things in this conversation that it becomes very easy to run together. One is the kind of linear causal chain, which is obviously Kant is heavily influenced by Christianity. And by extension, every later Kantian thinker is heavily influenced by Christianity. And there's the second idea, something about metaphysical philosophical foundations, uh, which would suggest that you couldn't form an argument for those without a prior belief in God. I'm perfectly happy to accept the first one. I think that it is, I almost think it's it's undeniable, right? Like this isn't how could how could philosophers not be influenced by the dominant philosophical system of the place they lived for the past 1,500 years? It's the second point that I more want to press on, the idea that um without uh the idea that you could not, even in principle, come to these conclusions without God. And I guess that depends on which principles we're talking about.

SPEAKER_08

So I I think thou shalt not kill um so C.S. Lewis in The Evolution of Man, who's got that appendix where he talks about commonalities between all sorts of worldviews and religions, and um I tick all those off and say, yeah, you're not man. I do think to particularly privilege the human and to say that every member of the human family, right to the very fringes, including your enemy, is by virtue of being human, um someone who is worthy of all provision and protection, who has claims on you simply by by virtue of being that kind of human. And that the human kind of there's a humanity that kind of judges us in that sense. I think that's what Tom Holland was getting at when he said, you know, the idea that humanism in that sense hangs in the ether is very theological because I think those those particular beliefs tend to, I think, historically have relied on God the human. And you might you might know of you know good examples of non-theistic groundings for that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_05

But yeah, I said I just I don't think we'd disagree particularly on this point. I think that um I think that you're absolutely right, and I think I think that Tom Holland is right as far as I as far as I know. I'm not a historian, so you may have made some glaring error, but it's not within my epistemic responsibility or ability to point it out. Um so I I I will sort of certainly read his thesis and I broadly agree with it. Yeah, so again, my point is not so much to do with linear history, it's to do with this this realm of metaphysical possibility. And I I I take a point regarding that the idea of human rights is in a sense theological. And I think that I think theological here, I would use the term metaphysical rather than theological, or non-material if you prefer. I think that there is, I think that there are there are subtle distinctions between different philosophical stances here that might help clarify some territorial list. Because it doesn't follow from being an atheist, you have to be a materialist. I'm, you know, um, I often, my tongue-in-cheek remark is that Plato is an atheist, and of course he's not, but my point is more that God doesn't do the very particular monotheistic ground, metaphysical grounding job uh that he does in other religions, and of course that's taken up with forms. So, yeah, so my point isn't so much to do with with linear history. We all, I mean, the entire uh intellectual tradition of Europe and America and Australia and uh beyond, I would even argue, owes, clearly owes a lot of its uh foundations to Christian thought. In the same, I mean, I won't always say in the same way, because I also don't, I don't, I'm not a subscriber to this thesis that Christian philosophy is fully continuous with the philosophy that came that came before it. Obviously not there, there are huge discontinuities, I think. Um I do think that there are precursors to um to certain Christian ideas in ancient philosophy, certainly not on Plato and Aristotle before. Uh that's uh you can't get egalitarianism from that. But um but certainly in different ancient schools of thought. So it's certain strains of Stoicism, particularly the Stoicism of Epictetus. Um you have this, well sorry, Epitetis is post-Christian, but not talking in a Christian context, and pre-Christian, I would identify certain sorts of schools of cynicism as similarly attacking these um social and ability distinctions of people as not fundamentally saying something about their Diogenes, the Cynic, has sort of become a bit of a meme online at the moment. But one of his very, very influential uh thoughts is this idea that social distinctions are arbitrary and aren't worthy of philosophical respect. In fact, uh I know there was a really interesting um phase of uh theological and philosophy of religion scholarship in the 90s where a bunch of people argued that Jesus was a cynic. Not in the historical sense, but just in the philosophical sense, um, although I think that's probably going a bit far.

SPEAKER_10

I want to just make sure that this is grounded in where our young people are today. So I think we'd all concede that we can turn to philosophers and worldviews and ideas to ground morality, let's say. But what is best going to protect the interests of what young people are concerned about? Because these guys want justice, they want uh minority groups to be protected. So, Joe, is this amazing philosophical heavyweights that you have behind you going to defend human rights in the way that, let's say, Glenn's arguing that Christians can? And I'll maybe turn to Glenn first and then he comes from.

SPEAKER_08

Joe very rightly pointed to the fact that all of us have a stopping point. You know, all of us get to, I was about to say a foundation with my hand in the air. A foundation down there or a highest principle up here that cannot be grounded by anything more ultimate, because if it was grounded by anything more ultimate, well, I guess that's the ultimate thing, right? We've all got something that is absolutely ultimate. I think for the Christian, um, I I was reading in the Bible this week in the New Testament, 1 John chapter 4, it's it's verse 8 says, you know, God is love, and then it goes on in verse 10 to say um God demonstrated his love in sending the Son to be a propitiation for our sins. And so, like God is love sounds like an abstraction that is not grounded in the way that you want. Um, and you can do lots of wonderful Trinitarian theology on the Father loving the Son and the joy of the Spirit, but how do we see that? Well, that's where verse 10 comes in, and it's God the Son becoming God our brother, bleeding his own heart's blood for the world, and according to the Bible, you've never seen anything more divine than that. Which there's the discontinuity with the ancient world, right? The ancient world puts people to death on crosses. God shows up on a cross in order to subvert all our expectations about what glory looks like, what transcendence looks like, what does divinity look like, and the New Testament says it looks like a human sacrifice choking to death, bleeding for his enemies, saying, Father, forgive. Like, well, okay. Um, that for me is ultimate. I don't like I became Christian age 21, like reading through the Gospels, just looking at him and thinking, he's tox. I can't improve on that. I guess he's ultimate, I guess Jesus is Lord. And as soon as you say Jesus is Lord, it's like bad luck you're a Christian. It just sneaks up on you, it's just because you you just you look at Christ on the cross and you think that that is interestingly, that is both the definition of God and that is the expression of goodness, all in one. And it is an expression of goodness that values the other, that values the victim, that values the marginalized, that values the lowly, if the world is the survival of the fittest and the sacrifice of the weakest. This is the sacrifice of the fittest, Jesus, for the survival of the weakest, us. So where do you get your where do you get your valuing, your prizing of the outsider, the vulnerable, the weak, um, I think you pull at that thread and you come back to a choking man on a cross. Um, that's that's where I would encourage people to look for their foundations. I think this intuition that is pointing to something true, to to lift up the little guy, to stand up for the weak and the marginalized, that that's an intuition that's true, and I think I think it finds its true foundation in Jesus.

SPEAKER_10

So if the love of God is removed, does that mean that people could be targeted or minority groups could be victims? How do you respond to that?

SPEAKER_05

Again, I think there are there are a couple of different ways uh you could take this. I would agree that I think that the the image of Christ dying on the cross, and for me, specifically him saying, forgive them, Father, they don't know what they do, is one of the most compelling and beautiful images I've ever come across. Um again, my point is just that I don't think that this is the only image that could ground it. I mean, I'm very interested in exploring this relationship between images and narrative and then later moral principles, because it strikes me that there is a relationship there, but the relationship isn't deductive. So it is logically possible for somebody to look at all of that and say, as people did, presumably, you know, look at all of that, as you've spoken about before, there's the the the the graffiti of um Christ on the cross with a donkey's head, uh, a bit of marking going, God, look at your God's been crucified, that's rubbish. God, a God would be crucified. And so, yes, I I so it is clearly possible to look at such images and not be compelled by them. And so I think that clearly there's a relationship here between the the historical event or an event that's taken place or a narrative and certain ethical conclusions. It's also clearly not a deductive relationship. So how do you think, as in, is do you have a sense of what that relationship is? Because I'm not disagreeing that there's one there, right? Because it strikes me that there are conclusions that follow in some way naturally from narratives, in a way that is fundamentally non-deductive. But I think that the non-deductive aspect of it allows for there to be other images that could lead to the same conclusion. So, um, sorry, sorry, no, no, I'm happy with it. Um so again, the kind of terabyta Buddhist narrative that you might you might want to use is this image of all of us suffering uh in this kind of cycle of reincarnation and rebirth, and also just the dissatisfactoriness of life. Uh, and that's one of the one of the many pillars upon which Buddha rests his idea of Siddharja Putan, um, rests his idea of universal compassion. And again, this is only one straight of Buddhism, so you know chasten to point out. Um, but again, my point is that if there's a non-adductive relationship, it's not the only way to ground it. I do agree that that if you were to pull on the historical thread of Britain and our moral foundations, we would end up with Christianity and not Theravada Buddhism. Um I just and I I yeah, I suppose I'm more saying that there are alternative schemes that could lead you to the same conclusion, uh, ethically, I suppose, in this natural follow-through way that I do think is fundamentally non-deductive. But I really do want to ask you about that, because partly because I think it's very obvious that there is something like naturally follows from a story. Um but you know, I'm an ex or a recovering logician, I should say. And um and I can clearly see that it's not deductive, it's not really inductive either, it's not really adductive. It's there is some sort of link between narrative and certain ethical conclusions or certain rules of conduct, and I can't quite see what it is. And I think you've probably thought about this more than I have, so I'd be really interested to get your thoughts on it.

SPEAKER_08

Um so the great Christmas reading, John chapter one, um, in the beginning was the word, the logos. Um it's it's kind of in the same ballpark etymologically as logic. But but certainly pre-the first Christmas, there are a whole bunch of Jews very much influenced by Plato, very much influenced by his idea of the logos. And all reality is rational. Logos has to do with rationality or word and that kind of thing. Um, and scripture just, you know, John chapter 1 begins with in the beginning was this logos, who's actually a person. Um in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made, without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness is not understood. And then it goes down to verse 14. The word, the logos, became flesh and dwelt among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only has come from the Father full of grace and truth. So there is log there is logic with flesh on. And there is a story that is, at the end of the day, what has upended the world. And certainly many theologians have reflected upon what it means for the Logos to be with God and to be God, and my goodness, there's all sorts of logical entailments of that, and the doctrine of the Trinity is a very intricate kind of doctrine, and lots of careful thought about what is a person, and personhood kind of comes out of that theological reflection, and I would say that the language of human rights develops out of that particular logical conception, but I think you're right, it's the story of God descending to the deepest depths and raising to the highest heights. There are definitely reflections of that everywhere in the world. That same reading, John chapter 1, um, says the true light that enlightens everyone was coming into the world. So speaking about Jesus coming into the world, um, is there enlightenment in Buddhism? Like there's literally scripture is telling you there is enlightenment in Buddha. But the true light that enlightens the world was coming in, the true light that enlightens the world was coming into the world. And I think what what I would say to a Buddhist would be, I love that story of entering into suffering out of love and finding compassion at the far end of that. I've heard that story before. And I I wouldn't I wouldn't want to get into a competition of like whose story is better at that point. But I I do think in Christianity there is a I I think it's kind of maximally great in that you've got the highest figure descending to the deepest depth. Within Buddhism, I think there are powerful echoes of that. Um, but I don't think it quite hits the heights or plums the depths.

SPEAKER_10

There's so much more that both of you can say at this point, but we want to make sure that these students are able to ask their questions to both of you. But please do press them because both of them are trying to make a claim of where rules come from, where human rights can be protected, and then you will want to ask them like, can their worldviews motivate society to live in a way that you guys would want to live in England? So I'm going to hand over to you to ask your questions.

SPEAKER_04

Um, you both said that you both talked from an objective morality point of view, where morality is based in objective truths. I wanted to know what you both thought of non-objective morality where we might make our own. So to take an existentialist point of view, that my existence precedes my essence. So if I make my own reality, what's the point in basing it at all?

SPEAKER_05

Um I suppose I suppose one thing I would want to say is that there is quite a gulf between subjective and objective morality. For instance, there's the idea of intersubjective morality is not unheard. Uh, this idea that somebody arguing for insubjective morality, to sort of um uh to kind of put it in sentence, might argue that morality is a little bit like language. So if I point at an apple and I say orange, I'm saying, I'm using the word incorrectly. There's a real sense in which I am I'm using the word wrong. And uh somebody who is arguing for some kind of insubjective form of morality uh might say that um that morals are a bit like that. Uh, you know, that they're they're maintained by groups andor humanity as a whole. Uh Kristen uh Christine Kalsgaard has, to a certain extent, an insubjective view of morality in that she thinks that it stems from humans recognizing their own rationality in agency and then inherently valuing them as an acting, and then they are just it's a facto committed to the value of rational agencial um actions and decisions and designs and so on and so forth. How a view evolves over time, and I'm absolutely butchering it here, but you get the picture. Uh so that that that would be one way of kind of cutting middle ground. Regarding subjective morality, look, I mean, maybe this is just very old-fashioned. I think that there are problems with saying, um, with at least self-consciously having a subjective morality. I think there are, again, there are two there are two questions here that I think will be quickly run together. The first is whether you have a morality that from a third-person perspective is subjective, but nonetheless you view it as um worth enough to compel other people to abide by it at least a little bit. Um, and the second is whether you can get by with a morality that you yourself know is subjective. I'm more skeptical on the second point than I am on the first. I sort of and I'm I'm sure I'm just missing some great chunk of literature that I haven't read. But I do think that there are real, I think there are real potential issues with saying, oh yeah, I think this is wrong, but I'm going to treat this as if it's just my opinion. Like even if you think it is just your opinion. I think that part of what distinguishes morality from taste is that it's something that you don't mind getting other people to do as well. So if I if you, you know, I'm I'm very, very partial to catch up on toast. Yeah, exactly. So you're shaking your head. Clearly, the idea repulses you. And why wouldn't it? My point is that that is very different from if I think that murder is wrong and you think that murder is right. I have no desire to enforce my quite puerile eating habit, I think. But if you thought that murder was right, I would, in some sense, be motivated to either change your mind or stop you from acting on that morality. I think that that might be one of the potential issues for purely for self-consciously constructed subjective morals. I'm not saying that people can't, in practice, live by whatever values that they want, just as a matter of descriptive fact. Clearly, people can have radically alternative moral systems to one another, in a sense they just live by those values. But I think that subconsciously treating your morals as something that really only governs you is, I think, going to cause difficulties in having that moral system do everything that you want it to do. Again, regardless that you know, you might say, well, okay, yeah, from a third person perspective, I recognise that my morality is subjective, but when I step inside the first person perspective, I'm treating it as if it's subjective. And that that's a coherent position. Um but again, I just wanted to pull out a few of those threads there. Because I think that the landscape might be a little bit more complicated. So if that made I hope that made any sense at 12, so sorry.

SPEAKER_08

Um I think we all live, mostly we live as objectivists, don't we? I think I expect others to have obligations towards me just as I feel certain obligations towards others, whether I fulfill those obligations or not. Um so you you certainly can articulate a subjective morality, but when you are wronged, um, I think the sense of outrage in you is testifying against you at that point.

SPEAKER_09

Um this is a question for you, specifically Glenn, just because I'm particularly drawn to um the argument for evolution being the kind of answer to a lot of our moral questions. You know, we ask actually, why do I feel like I don't know, adultery is wrong? A lot of these, the answer to these questions I think can be drawn very clearly to evolution. Um and you know, my question I think is do you think that it's possible to draw enough links so that at some stage we get to a point where I mean you believe that it's only God who like founds this, or is it God who like uh I guess like fills out the answers to these questions? So is it is it God who founds evolution who founds our normal truths, or is there in some way evolution is not kind of sufficient? I guess that's the question.

SPEAKER_08

So might might there be a goodness that is God given to which evolution is tending to possible, is it? But uh I think I think on on the question of the survival of the fittest and the question of an ethic that's derived from a cross, I think we've got something that's that's looking quite different at that stage. Um, and and in particular the treatment of the weak, um, which is so vital within the teaching of Jesus and of Christianity, um, and seems to be now there is all sorts of argument for pro-social behavior within the Darwinian framework, sure, but I don't think you get from simply pro-social behavior and in-prote amity to uh privileging of the weak and a lifting them up and an ensuring that they survive to reproduce, to put it bluntly. So I I think at that point that's that sounds quite un-Christian. And interestingly, the the a lot of the Christian, historically, a lot of the Christian rejection or reaction against Darwin in the 19th century was on moral grounds. It was it was, you know, well you're gonna get scientific racism out of this, aren't you? And sure enough, for the next century there was a heck of a lot of scientific racism, and there were human zoos, and there were, you know, all sorts of tribes people kind of shipped over and put into zoos so that people could look at them and here is the missing link and that kind of thing. And and I think a lot of a lot of the Christian worry about Darwin was actually a moral worry about Darwin. And I and I think at certain levels you can answer some of those qualms and objections. I don't think you can answer all of them, especially about the weak. And I think I do think an ethic of the cross and an ethic of survival of the first is at odds at a quite fundamental level.

SPEAKER_05

Do you want to respond to that? Um I mean not particularly actually. I mean, I just I think that um I think that uh I think that there, again, I think this touches on that linear causation versus sort of grounding distinction that I've I've sort of been um pulling upon a couple of times in the discussion. I think you're probably right in the in the sense, like I said, I think that it is it doesn't strike me as particularly um problematic that we would eventually get kind of a causal story of how human evol of how human evolution, coupled with things like potentially group selection and think, you know, this idea that you can, you know, the human uh the tools that eventually that made us empathize and find our own children cute uh can be expanded outwards, and then also the kind of development of culture and stuff. I think that the causal story of how we got to our current moral system is fine. I think that I think that there, or certain philosophers I think definitely would would raise potential worries about transforming the simple description of Darwinism as a means by a means to causally explain why we have certain moral intuitions like adultery is wrong or something like that, um, to I think that a lot of people would have an issue with then the further inference that means that those rules should, or those intuitions are true or should continue to be upheld. Um I it's not that I think that Darwinism is incompatible with a story, um obviously I don't think that's incompatible with a story that would make those, that will ground those in something moral realist or moral realist adjacent. Um I just think there will have to be a story on top of that. Um I think that's just the kind of is all the gap, I suppose.

SPEAKER_09

When you say the story. Do you want to back to it? No, it's okay. When you say the story on top of that, do you mean some kind of explanation as to how this like direction of goodness comes about? Is that what you're saying? What do you mean by the I'm sorry?

SPEAKER_05

Oh, sorry, I meant I mean kind of a truth maker for statements like murder is wrong. Like when I ask you, okay, you know, why is that um, you know, how do you know that that table has got a white clothing or something like that? What in virtue of what is is that statement true, you can point to it and you can say, okay, it's true because of because of this stuff. Uh because of certain facts about sense of perception, you can touch it. That's kind of um, but that's not a that's not necessarily a linear causal story, it's a story about how that fact is grounded upon other facts. What what makes that true? And I think, oh sorry.

SPEAKER_09

Yeah, so you're like taking the step back to going, how is this all here in the first place?

SPEAKER_05

Well, not not necessarily not so much like how is it all here, but in virtue of what is a given statement true or false? If that makes sense. I don't know if that's I I don't know if I'm expressing myself particularly in the first.

SPEAKER_09

Thank you.

SPEAKER_10

I think there was a guy in behind you who had a question first.

SPEAKER_06

Um I'm curious, uh if um God is the source of morality, what attribute of God um would you say makes um God the definite sour an objective source of morality rather than a perspective of morality? I guess I mean, could you believe in a creator god or even a Christian god and think and disagree with them on a moral issue?

SPEAKER_08

You're setting me up for the trap, the doors of early architect. I see what you're doing. No, that's um very good question. Because I think Joe sort of anonymously raising Euthyphro, were you kind of?

SPEAKER_05

I didn't want to call it euthyphro. I don't think I didn't want to draw on the arbitrariness part of it, I just want to draw the definition of one. Yes.

SPEAKER_08

Euthyphro, people understand, yes. You study Euthyphro? Yeah, yeah, okay. So, you know, um is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious? Or is it called pious because the gods love it? Um is there some virtue that stands above God that makes him moral? Um, or is it just that God says it must be good? Um, which sounds pretty arbitrary at that point. Um so the euthyphro dilemma kind of comes up in Socrates' last, uh last dialogue, Plato's last dialogue. And um, in a sense, Plato's got a solution to his own dilemma in that there is the Platonic realm of the good, um, which is, as you say, kind of non-conscious, impersonal. Um and so Plato's answer to that question is well, um, whatever we say is God is just the good. It's just an equivalency. Um that that has a certain um that sort of solves the dilemma, but it doesn't sound very satisfying. It doesn't sound very satisfying to me as a Christian, because if goodness is grounded in something that is impersonal, that feels unfitting to me. That the the highest good is itself incapable of goodness. Because morality is, you know, you need to be a moral agent, you need to be person, really, in order for kind of uh moral statements to be true or false of you. And so I wonder whether there's something unsatisfying to me as a Christian in thinking about this platonic realm as just the good, as itself impersonal, and therefore the good is itself neither good nor bad. Um and and this I I feel let me let me tell you history the way I want to tell history, and you can you can sort of sort of fact-check and correct correctly later. But it it does seem to me like a lot of Jews in the time before the incarnation, and then certainly Christians from the time after the incarnation, were saying to a lot of Platonists, oh, you know the good. We've got a name for him. Like he's called he's called God. And that was kind of the way that they did evangelism, and it was it was wildly successful, really. A lot of Platonists kind of became Christians because kind of the message to them was you've believed in this impersonal thing called the good that grounds all things. Um let me tell you some, let me fill out that picture for you. And I think the way in which Christians can fill out that picture a lot more satisfyingly is in a Trinitarian doctrine of God, where you've got distinct persons who are equal but distinct, who love one another, and there is reciprocity in the life of God, such that 1 John 4, verse 8 can say God is love. It doesn't just say God is loving. See, that would be an attribute by which we can judge God. But 1 John 4, verse 8 doesn't say God is loving, he is loving, but it says God is love constitutionally, eternally, primordially. The Father has been loving the Son in the joy of the Spirit, and because there's been this life of distinction and unity and mutual deference, there kind of, according to Scripture and according to the Christian tradition, there is a life of liberty, equality, and fraternity from before the world began. There is a moral life that predated and produced the world. Not just an impersonal kind of form of the good, but actual interpersonal love. So I would say the good life is love, because as 1 John 4 goes on to say, God is love. Those who live in love live in God and God lives in them. So I would say love is the greatest commandment. It's the greatest commandment from Jesus because it is this ultimate ontological truth about ultimate reality that God is love. Therefore, to go with love is to go with the grain of the universe.

SPEAKER_10

Any final questions? I know you want to say anything. I just wanted to take in a couple of more questions.

SPEAKER_03

So, yeah, my question is for Glenn. Um, how how can we be sure that the Christian set of morals, especially in the Old Testament, is consistent with the set of morals that we innate feel as humans?

SPEAKER_08

Well, it's not. Um, because I think because I think scripture is a story, um, and it's a story with a beginning and a middle and an end and development and a fall and lots of twists and turns along the way. And that's not really I hope it doesn't come across as that's a post-hoc rationalization for oh, I don't like the Old Testament. I do like the Old Testament, I love the Old Testament, I read the Old Testament every day. Um, but Jesus himself told us to read the Bible in a certain way. So in Matthew chapter 19, he's asked a particularly thorny ethical dilemma from his own day, and he actually gives a framework to tell the story of Scripture. He says, Well, in the beginning it was like this, but then there was a fall, and our hearts were hardened. So Moses told the people this, and this was a non-ideal state of affairs. Um, and there are many things in the Old Testament that are profoundly non-ideal, right? And then Jesus says, And I have come to restore things to the intention at the beginning. So there's lots we could go into there, but I think it's very important to read scripture as a story with a shape to it, in the beginning, goodness, a fall into something that's very suboptimal. And even Jesus says, look, Moses gave you even laws that were suboptimal. Um, how much more suboptimal was the behavior of the people to whom those laws were given? Um, and even within the Old Testament, there's there's lots of questioning of um of the activity of the people and all that kind of thing. So that's that's that's the way a Christian reads scripture through the lens of Jesus as we see the shape of the story.

SPEAKER_10

I think this is a really key question, because obviously you're articulating that Christianity is the best, goodest, bestest thing to bring love in the world. But I think you might want to respond to how does a secular person hear what he's just said?

SPEAKER_05

Um, oh well in terms of the kind of reading scripture as a story.

SPEAKER_10

Isn't is is Christianity the good for human rights equality? Is it what we want in society?

SPEAKER_05

Well, I mean, obviously there are there are elements of of of um uh of Christian teachings that tend to jive against um or tend to rub up against um a lot of like modern moral intuitions, particularly around sort of aspects of sexual ethics, and and but I don't know, maybe it's just because I'm more focused on the meta-ethical point. Um I kind of it's it's yeah, I mean, it's sort of, but in some ways, this is just where you get two people at loggerheads, right? Because if one person is taking a kind of an intuitionist foundation for their ethics, another person's taking a scriptural foundation, there's a disagreement. I'm not really sure what either of them can appeal to to resolve that. It's just that they have different first principles. To go back to what I said in my talk, they have begun by asserting different things as uh by definition good. And so I'm not, I mean, it's a it's a practical problem and it might be a, it might cause disagreement. Um, it strikes me that it's it's not necessarily. I I even go so far as to say I'm not even sure it's a disagreement that can be resolved in principle. If if um I think that something is by definition good and somebody else thinks that something is by definition not good, then I'm not entirely sure what to do there. As in in most situations, what we do is say, well, we're talking past one another. And the reason that that's less satisfying in morality is because morality translates into action and you know we all have to live in the same world of action. So I to a certain extent I think that at that point you're you're kind of you're kind of then in the realm of pragmatics, or you're in the realm of attempting to appeal to one another's sense of moral intuition. Um so I I sort of don't, I'm not necessarily sure that there is a neat logical resolution to just a genuine conflict of moral intuitions then. Um at least that both can agree on it, sorry.

SPEAKER_10

But maybe these guys want to ground in something today, because they're talking human rights. So do you guys want to press that further? Any anybody that hasn't asked a question?

SPEAKER_02

Or maybe not.

SPEAKER_01

I mean, it's not about human rights, but uh yeah, no, my question is um building on well, it's from Ezriott's question actually, is to uh for Joe. Um you said that the problem uh you can't have a moral system which is governed by our minds and our desires regarding the uh subjective reality. Is why.

SPEAKER_05

Oh, oh sorry, I didn't mean you can't have a moral system um as in that that has some reference to subjective desires or anything like that. I mean plenty of moral systems have reference to subjective desires. And what I'm suggesting is that, at the very least, it's not an and I'm not suggesting this is a problem that is unsolvable. Um I'm just suggesting that it presents a kind of on the face of it initial difficulty for somebody viewing their own morality as simply governing them. Is that we tend, is that the scope of our moral statements tend not to just include us. So when I say murder is wrong, practically I tend not to just mean that murder is wrong for me, I tend to also mean that it's wrong for other people. As in, even if I'm not saying that um explicitly, that is often what my mor how my morals translate into pragmatic action. And I'm not suggesting, again, I'm not suggesting that this is a necessarily an issue for a descriptive picture of the world. I'm suggesting that if you're viewing your own morality as simply something that only governs you, then there is a sense in which you you lose the ability to do a lot of things based on that moral system. And you might be fine with that. Like I'm not suggesting you know, you can bite that bullet. Or you can try and reconcile the two. You could say something like, um, yeah, sure, the foundations for my morality only govern me, but nonetheless, I'm only endorsing my own actions. You know, I think that I I'm I don't think that murder is wrong, but I think that it is right for me to stop murder. Like, I don't think murder is wrong universally, but I'm governing myself and by my own values I'm going to stop murder. And, you know, whether that is satisfying to you will sort of be a matter of philosophical intuition and predisposition. Um I was more suggesting that there are initial difficulties with self-consciously saying my morality only governs me. And not necessarily saying that those are insoluble, they're just there.

SPEAKER_10

Do we have time for them just to land a statement?

unknown

Or yeah.

SPEAKER_10

Yeah? Final statements. England, a hundred years time. Why should Christianity still be here? Literally, you've got ten seconds, and then you've got a final ten seconds to land your case.

SPEAKER_08

I think because it's good and it's true. And um I don't think you're going to find anything that tops Jesus. Uh if you can find uh a vision of God and a vision of the good that beats um God plumbing the depths of hell to rise up again and invite the world into eternal love. Um, if you if you can find a better story than that, go for your life. Um but I I don't I don't think so. Thank you, Glenn.

SPEAKER_05

Uh I just wanted to suggest that there are perhaps more philosophies and more meta ethical positions and more ways of grounding morality than we might have initially thought of, and that these are worth exploring and investigating, and I will let you come to your own conclusions about them.