Nowadays, it is fashionable to dismiss God, and to dismiss the idea that our moral sense of duty comes from God, starting with the voice of sound conscience. Worse, save for the Catholic Church, the idea that there is an intelligible, built in -- and yes, Creation Order -- first law pivoting on justice, has long since been relegated to history by the legal profession. Instead, we find a widespread notion that morality is subjective [so largely an accident of personality and/or culture and upbringing], relative and evolving . . . which is conflated with "progressing."
All of this fashionable thought, frankly, is self-servingly dubious, and a likely source of the perversity long since exposed and rebuked by Isaiah the prophet:
Isa 5: 18 Woe to those who draw iniquity with cords of falsehood, who draw sin as with cart ropes . . . 20 Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!
21 Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes, and shrewd in their own sight!
22 Woe to those who are heroes at drinking wine, and valiant men in mixing strong drink, 23 who acquit the guilty for a bribe, and deprive the innocent of his right! [c 700 BC]
Of course, we see here, how the prophet explains in outline, how wickedness and injustice are tied to falsity, moral inversion, self-conceit, bribery and injustice thus misgovernment. This implies that he considers these intelligible, within our intellectual grasp, once we are willing to be corrected towards soundness.
Similarly, in his farewell address to Israel, Moses writes:
Deut 10: 12 “And now, Israel, what does the LORD your God require of you, but to fear the LORD your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, 13 and to keep the commandments and statutes of the LORD, which I am commanding you today for your good? 14 Behold, to the LORD your God belong heaven and the heaven of heavens, the earth with all that is in it . . . 17 For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who is not partial and takes no bribe. [c. 1406 BC]
We already see here, a vision that God is creator-sustainer and owner of the heavens and the earth, including ourselves, that he is not only supreme, mighty and great but also good and wise. Also, incorruptibly just. Elsewhere, God is seen as eternal and of course our Father in heaven. Indeed, at Mars Hill (c. 50 AD), Paul favourably cites pagan poets, in him we live and move and have our being.
So, although these worthies probably did not understand the detailed, technical significance of such a cumulative picture of God for say the IS-OUGHT gap, or the Euthyphro dilemma, the concept of necessary being and other arguments of recent times, we do find here a vision of the true God as one, as inherently good, utterly wise, without beginning or end [i.e. eternal], creator-sustainer, supreme.
For example, God commands the good because he is inherently good and utterly wise and loves us. So, his commands are "for your good."
Indeed, that vision finds expression in Isaiah:
55:1 “Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. 2 Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. 3 Incline your ear, and come to me; hear, that your soul may live . . . .
6 “Seek the LORD while he may be found; call upon him while he is near; 7 let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the LORD, that he may have compassion on him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. 8 For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. 9 For as the heavens are higher than the earth [--> suggestive of infinity*], so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.
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* Here, our perceived space (the space that appears Euclidean) invites the concept of being beyond finite limit, hence it enables us to conceive of infinity; indeed an infinite continuum. BTW, this implies that a truer, fuller, more cogent, ultimately more useful basic concept of numbers is the hyperreals not just the reals.
Yes, as Paul advises in Rom 2, "[our] conscience also bears witness" and "[our] conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse," duly humbling us to recognise that we are fallible, finite, morally struggling and too often ill willed or even stubborn or trapped in evil ways. Yes, there are struggles with and vexed debates over the judgements of God on individuals (such as a Job or a Saul or a David or a Jesus) and over nations whose "cup of iniquity" is so full that they become ruinous plagues on the earth, and we find God to be passionately involved with us: God "SO LOVED . . ."
But on the whole we find a coherent view of God that indeed invites the summary that God is inherently good, utterly wise, creator-sustainer, the one supreme and necessary [so eternal and infinite] world root being, worthy of our loyalty and responsible reasonable service.
In this context, I find that C Stephen Evans has a few thought-provoking words for us:
It is common to refer to our moral obligations collectively as consti-tuting the moral law. Is this simply a way of speaking or does this language capture a deep truth? Many morally earnest people would affirm that there is indeed something about our moral obligations that gives them the status of law. But what kind of law? Must there be a law-giver? If so, who is that law-giver?
A traditional answer is that morality is grounded in God. Modern and contemporary philosophers have tended to find this view sim-plistic and naïve. In this book I defend the claim that there is truth and wisdom in this traditional view, and that the philosophers who have dismissed the claim have been much too hasty. Our moral obligations either are identical to divine commands or are grounded in such commands. However, I argue that God communicates his requirements in many ways, including through conscience, and this makes it possible for people who do not believe in God nonetheless to have an awareness of their moral obligations . . . . |
Many religious people have thought that a “divine command” account of moral obligation is a rival to some other popular approaches, particularly “natural law ethics” and “virtue ethics.” An important part of this work is an argument that it is a mistake to think of these approaches as rivals. A religiously grounded ethic needs all three types of accounts to do full justice to all of morality. [God and Moral Obligation (Oxford University Press, 2012) pp. v - vi.]
He could have stopped there, but as a philosopher, he is aware of the deep connexions between the main foci of philosophy:
I hope it is clear that the conclusions reached have profound implica-tions for [philosophy of religion/ our idea of God, and theology, thus metaphysics, epistemology etc.]. In particular, if moral obligations are divine requirements, then humans who are aware of moral duties have a kind of direct awareness of God, and those who do not realize that moral obligations are God’s requirements may nonetheless be brought to see this through reflection on the nature of moral duties [--> thus the world-root level, is-ought bridging significance of the voice of sound conscience, for, post Hume, only in the root of reality can is and ought be bridged; and only the God of such ethical theism can successfully bridge that gap]. [p. vi.]
In a similar vein, William E Mann writes:
The first order of business is to provide an account of God’s nature that is philosophically defensible and adequate to the conception of deity found in the Abrahamic religions. The account that I offer maintains that God, unlike all other beings, is perfect and simple. Perfection entails that God is essentially immutable, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly good, a con-scious sovereign and caring [--> so, loving] personal being who has no equals, flaws, or weak-nesses. Simplicity entails that God has no physical or metaphysical parts, temporal stages, or properties. Philosophical critics may have doubts about the tenability of this account, both as a matter of logical plausibility and as a matter of religious accuracy. It would be rash of me to claim to quell all reasonable doubts. But I believe that several of them are dispelled in the chapters that follow, and I am eager to entertain new doubts.
The second order of business is to account for the relationship between God and the world’s inhabitants. At its most basic level, that relationship is between creator and creatures, a relationship of radical dependency that stands in need of explica-tion. I argue for the theses that everything that is not God is brought into existence ex nihilo by God and is conserved in its existence by God for as long as it exists. God’s sovereignty is, on the view I hold, what makes all true propositions true. This view must have answers for three critical questions. First, if God is somehow | responsible for the truth of all contingent propositions, can the view accommodate human freedom, and if so, how? I argue that on any reasonable conception of human freedom, there is no conflict between divine sovereignty and freedom. Second, what is the status of necessary truths: are they independent of God’s sov-ereignty? On this issue, I reject Platonism and present a quasi-Augustinian account according to which necessary truths are dependent on God. [God, Modality and Morality (Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 1 - 2.]
Of course, as Mann notes from objectors, there is no identifiable greatest finite integer, so the notion of a supreme being of maximal greatness needs clarification.
A simple, first approximation answer is to recognise adulteration, tainting, or flaws vs that which is utterly pure, say, pure vs adulterated or tainted milk. God being utterly good and utterly supreme is another way of saying that there is no lack in God's essential qualities, which also exist in a context of compossibility. For example, God's supreme power is consistent with his inherent goodness and utter wisdom so he will not do evil. Indeed, evil here emerges as -- roughly speaking -- that which parasites off what is good, frustrating it from its due end, often in hope of immediate advantage (pleasure, power, treasure . . .); but at cost of introducing chaos.
In turn, echoing Plantinga, as freedom is a requisite of highest goods such as love, credible reason etc, the possibility of such abuse is implicit in a world that can have in it such highest goods. Thus, too, our responsibility as creatures with the gift of freedom to do the good, wise, true.
These are already a good first ground to recognise the Ciceronian first duties, and first law:
Mann, p. 11, adds another aspect, addressing the stone paradox as to whether God can create a stone so large and heavy he cannot move it (which is intended to suggest that omnipotence is incoherent as a concept):
Now an ingenious—and I think correct—way of dissipating the [large stone] paradox appears to have been first hinted at by George Mavrodes and developed more fully by Wade Savage. 9 Their approach is to argue that the proposition that God cannot create a stone He cannot move is true, but that it does not specify a task that God cannot perform. It is, rather, the logical consequence of two other propositions—that God can create stones of any poundage and that God can move stones of any poundage. And we would expect these two propositions to be entailed by the proposition that God is omnipotent. Hence, if God is omnipotent, He cannot create a stone He cannot move, but this imposes no limitations on His stone-creating and stone-moving powers; on the contrary, it is a consequence of there being no limits to the poundage of stones He can create and move. [--> Which, further, illustrates that, often, our perceived contradictions are due to inadequate concepts, not to what would be a suggested state of affairs that is not possible of being. Ironically, what is impossible is the suggested stone too big for God to move!]
More can be said, and will be DV. But this is enough food for thought for today. END
