Things Have Changed Since Abraham
Here's some intriguing research that suggests people will impute their own morality to whatever deity they believe in.
While the general picture has the causality moving in the opposite direction, this isn't too surprising.
One would expect people, especially in an open society, to reject a god who tells them to do things they think immoral. So rather than search for a religion that fits them better, they'll bend their religion to fit their views.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:24 AM
3 Comments:
I'm not sure this research is persuasive.
Suppose I asked any theist, "What color is this paper?", and they say, "Yellow". Then I ask, "What color does God think this paper is?" Presumably their answers would be the same.
Now I bring the paper closer, and show them that it's not quite the hue they thought. Perhaps I use some persuasion -- put it next to a lemon and say, can the paper really be yellow if this is a lemon? isn't the paper really green? -- and they finally say, "The paper is green." So I then ask, "What color does God think the paper is?" and they will say "green." How could they not?
The underlying logic is clear: God knows everything. Therefore, if I believe that polygamy is moral, then it follows that God agrees. If I change my mind and conclude that polygamy is immoral, it follows that God agrees.
What this study shows is that most theists are basically Aristotelians rather than nominalists. Nominalists hold that things are moral or immoral simply because God has decreed that they are, and human reason can tell us nothing about morality. A nominalist view would be confounded by this study. The Aristotelian view -- that human reason and introspection can discover moral truths -- is not in any way compromised by this study, since these same moral truths are surely known to God.
So the message to Aristotelians is when you're told by a voice in the sky to kill your son, ignore it?
Some passages in the Bible seem to suggest the Aristotelian / Natural Law view, whereas others seem to suggest the "morality is whatever God says it is" view. The Isaac sacrifice story is the most blatant example of the latter kind of story.
To harmonize this story with an Aristotelian / Natural Law view, several explanations have been suggested:
(1) Abraham and Sarah had been too old to have children. God promised them a son, and delivered. So Abraham now understood that God was the creator of each human being, with the power of life and death. Therefore he figured that even if God demanded he go through with the sacrifice, God would raise Isaac back from the dead afterward.
or
(2) Abraham had already gotten to know what God was like, to realize that God's morality was natural morality, and to trust God. So when God gave him a command that made no sense, it was reasonable for him to accept that God -- who shared Abramam's morality but was smarter than Abraham -- must have a reason for this command that was consistent with natural morality, but he was not revealing the reason for the time being.
or
(3) Natural law morality applies in the vast majority of cases. However, in a few ad hoc cases God issues inscrutable commands that are exceptions from natural law. But since God is the author of both natural law and these particular exceptions, all of them promote the same good.
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